Dumping vista for XP. Can I expect problems?

Angelina-M

Hi all

I've got a new laptop (a Dell Vostro advertised on the grabbit forum) that came with Vista home edition and I hate it.

Its a core 2 duo 2 gig processor but its no faster than my old pentium 2.8 running XP :mad:

I am thinking of formatting and installing XP but I'm worried about driver issues. Has anyone else dumped Vista in favour of XP?

I've done all the tweaks to make Vista run faster but I still don't rate its performance.

I dont fancy a dual boot system so if I do it then Vista has to go.

RocketMan

A friend of mine managed to get his new VAIO to run on XP, it took a while of taking to Sony to get hold of the drivers, they tried to fob him off a couple of times saying that they did not offer them.

Before you do the right thing and get rid of vista make sure you have a flash drive with all the XP drivers for the laptop.

I had a quick look on the Dell website and for the Vostro laptops I looked at they had the XP drivers available for download, go to the dell.co.uk website, then clic on Support from the tabs at the top, then choose drivers and downloads and follow the on screen prompts.

Good luck!!

Browntoa

have you tried the vista Service Pack 1 update ??

meant to improve things

chuckles1066

Angelina-M wrote: »

I am thinking of formatting and installing XP but I'm worried about driver issues. Has anyone else dumped Vista in favour of XP?

I had to switch one of my Dimension 9200's back to XP because there are no Vista drivers for the video capture card that drives my CCTV system.

No problems at all, the Dell site had all the drivers.

As Browntoa says, Vista SP1 has improved things (particularly file transfer) but it's still buggy.

DatabaseError

Angelina-M wrote: »

I am thinking of formatting and installing XP but I'm worried about driver issues. Has anyone else dumped Vista in favour of XP?

repeatedly! taken pcs and lappys out of the box and their first boot has been to an xp disk!
never had any problems, network cards have always been detected, so i pop online and get the drivers (i have backup pc(s) in case lan not detected)

motorguy

O/P - you mention a 2 gig processor, i take it you mean a processor and 2 gig of ram?

If its running less than 2 gig of ram an upgrade will greatly help.

Also, limit what the machine is loading into memory at startup, if you havent done so already.

I've a dell laptop and a dell pc with less power than yours running vista at decent enough speed.

Angelina-M

Thanks guys I will save all my stuff and get rid of this carppy Vista. It seems I'm not alone in my dissaproval of this operating system.

I havent installed the service pack as from what I read of Vista its still not up to scratch.

Hi pgilc1

I mean the processor size is 2 gig. It has 2 gig of ram.

Yes I've stopped everything starting up at bootup etc. I am a bit of a techie and decent enough speed isnt enough. I want to get the most out of my laptop and I don't think Vista is going to give me that until it improves dramatically!

pgilc1 wrote: »

O/P - you mention a 2 gig processor, i take it you mean a processor and 2 gig of ram?

If its running less than 2 gig of ram an upgrade will greatly help.

Also, limit what the machine is loading into memory at startup, if you havent done so already.

I've a dell laptop and a dell pc with less power than yours running vista at decent enough speed.

robt_2

Angelina-M wrote: »

Hi all

I've got a new laptop (a Dell Vostro advertised on the grabbit forum) that came with Vista home edition and I hate it.

Its a core 2 duo 2 gig processor but its no faster than my old pentium 2.8 running XP :mad:

I am thinking of formatting and installing XP but I'm worried about driver issues. Has anyone else dumped Vista in favour of XP?

I've done all the tweaks to make Vista run faster but I still don't rate its performance.

I dont fancy a dual boot system so if I do it then Vista has to go.

Why did you expect a new operating system to be faster than a 7 year old one (XP)?

Poppycat

Yes I have a Dell with Vista business I dumped it with 2 weeks after I got the laptop, back to XP (dell have drivers on there web site) Vista ran dual core 2 with 2GB of ram slow and battery (6 cells) runs down much quicker than with XP as cpu works harder with Vista than with XP. I get about 30-35 minutes more now with XP than with Vista and its rune so much more smoother.

Vista is dire. I been using MS since windows 3.1 and Vista is the worse OS they have ever had

Millionaire

Ive got Vista running on a 1.6GHZ Dual Core Laptop with 1GB Ram with 256mb Shared Graphics which I recntly brought for around £350.

Out of the Box it was dog slow.

However 4-5 hrs fiddling around, remving programs, installing decent programs, stopping certain services, startup items and loading all updates.

It now runs extremly smooth and boots very quick for the spec.

Considering you are running it on better spec than mine and you still find it slow,

You must have some programs that are heavy on resources on it which most likley don't require running.

What items are booting on startup? Have you fiddled around killing some services?

Angelina-M

robt is it because I'm an old fashioned crazy fool?

Poppycat I never even considered battery life. Yet another reason to change over to XP. I have to say its not as good as I expected it would be. I've got the nine cell. As long as I can get XP has drivers for my network card i'll be up and running.

Millionaire I've stripped back the services and there's nothing running in the background now that shouldn't be. I havent spent a lot of time tweaking it though and I know there's probably other stuff that I can do to make it better.

I built a couple of computers over Christmas with core 2 duo processors(2.2gig and 2.6) with 2 gig ram and running XP. These fly in comparison to my Vista.