Downgrading vista to xp

[Richard McClellan]

I've actually tried to the do the same thing on an HP laptop that came with Vista and I wanted to downgrade to XP. After installing XP, I was never able to get all the drivers working right and was actually forced to go back and install Vista again. So, just something to keep in mind, your laptop may not even have XP drivers available for it.

Unfortunately I don't remember the exact model number, this was a friend's laptop that he bought about 6 months ago.

[Gamer930]

I will backup what richardmcc2 just said. With most laptops that are being produced there isn't many XP Drivers for. Make sure when you are going to "downgrade" to XP that you have Drivers for everything or you will be sorry.

Maybe you can explain more on the problems you are having with Vista?? There are a lot of help out there now for Vista. When I originally tried vista a year ago there wasn't support for it and many programs aren't compatible. I just put vista back onto my desktop a month ago and love it totally. . . Took a long time to setup correctly and fix some minor bugs that come with it. I think service pack 1 will fix most of these problems.

[Gdeaver]

Be aware that for many new HP notebooks, you may not be able to get full featured drivers for XP. This may affect power management and other special HP provided features.

[JBotAlan]

Originally Posted by Tristan Lall

I'm surprised that nobody's asked: what's the issue you're experiencing with Vista? Unsurprisingly, killing the OS and reinstalling is a pretty crude and wasteful way of keeping your computer happy, in a lot of cases.

What do you use Vista for? Word processing and checking your e-mail? Or do you have one of those 4.5GHz machines with 8GB of RAM?

For me, it is the fact that with every feature turned off it takes 1GB of 2GB RAM total...AT IDLE. What could it possibly be doing with all of that RAM? I can't even express how outrageous that is...

Vista keeps the cores on a dual-core 1.7GHz system around 20% load, as opposed to XP's occasional 1%. This makes power saving impossible--since the cores never idle, the battery is always being sucked down and the fan is always on. Even the simplest of games (Pocket Tanks, StepMania) running on top of Vista run at half their intended frame rate, even on a system with a specially purchased nVIDIA chip, instead of the crappy Intel Integrated stuff.

Not to mention everything has been moved. Something that was 3 clicks away in XP is now buried under new headings in the Control Panel.

Vista itself is more wasteful than the person buying an XP license to replace Vista.

When XP support is dropped, it is likely I will be switching to Ubuntu, or a Mac.

JBot

[Tristan Lall]

Originally Posted by JBotAlan

What do you use Vista for? Word processing and checking your e-mail? Or do you have one of those 4.5GHz machines with 8GB of RAM?

That's a bit of a false dichotomy, isn't it? Incidentally, it's used for all the usual office stuff (several running at once, of course), plus CAD and 3-D games. And the computer isn't anything fancy, either: the everyday desktop system has a 2.8 GHz P4 (Northwood, with SMT) with 1.5 GB of RAM, a 9600 Pro with 128 MB of RAM, and boots off of a pair of WD360GDs in a RAID 1 array. That's early-to-mid-2003 technology, and it manages to score 4.2/4.5/4.2/3.7/5.1 on the Windows Experience Index test (where 3.0s are marginal for Vista with Aero and sufficient without Aero, 4.0s are considered enough for Vista with Aero, and 5.0s were top-end as of fall 2006). And more importantly, it runs pretty well. Yes, running Windows 2000 SP4 was a little faster for basic things (with its less-resource-intensive version of Windows Explorer), but Vista is hardly slow.

Originally Posted by JBotAlan

For me, it is the fact that with every feature turned off it takes 1GB of 2GB RAM total...AT IDLE. What could it possibly be doing with all of that RAM? I can't even express how outrageous that is...

That's a common misconception, but in fact, this behaviour is beneficial to your system (though admittedly not to your power consumption). The important metric for memory usage on a Windows NT system is the commit charge, which is loosely expressed in Task Manager as the Pagefile Usage graph. (Microsoft has managed to mislabel it in XP, but it was right in 2000, and is pretty much right in Vista.) The commit limit is the maximum amount of memory the system can allocate—usually defaulting to approximately 1.5 times your physical memory, depending on the pagefile settings.

Now, the entire strategy employed by Windows is to use up as much of the physical RAM as possible, while keeping the pagefile at its default size (it can grow in response to memory needs). Why? Because RAM is fast, and if you're not using it, it's doing nothing for you, in terms of performance. Windows tries to keep as much stuff as possible in RAM, and stores the rest off to the side, but readily accessible in the page file. It will look first in the RAM, and if it finds what it needed, there are no HD operations involved, speeding things up. When it does need to consult the hard drive, then things do slow down a little, but not until you run out of pagefile room (i.e. you hit the commit limit) are you actually out of memory. So when Windows has 1 GB of RAM allocated at idle, it's because it's trying to save time the next time you need to fetch something from RAM, by precaching it. This is actually a good thing, but because of the way Windows 95/98/Me handled memory, people still think that using up a lot of memory at idle is a bad thing. To reiterate: you're only in trouble when you need to handle more data at once than you have physical memory (e.g. a 2 GB paging operation, on a system with 1 GB of RAM), or when you exceed the commit limit. Prior to that, the ideal situation is for 100% of your physical RAM to be filled with useful stuff by the operating system.

Originally Posted by JBotAlan

Vista keeps the cores on a dual-core 1.7GHz system around 20% load, as opposed to XP's occasional 1%. This makes power saving impossible--since the cores never idle, the battery is always being sucked down and the fan is always on. Even the simplest of games (Pocket Tanks, StepMania) running on top of Vista run at half their intended frame rate, even on a system with a specially purchased nVIDIA chip, instead of the crappy Intel Integrated stuff.

There are a couple of things that might be the source of your issues. Have you set the power management options to Power Saver? And what's disk indexing set to do? The indexing service is a bit of a resource hog, when it's updating its catalogue; it's the most likely candidate for eating 20% of your CPU time. Many people don't use its features, and can simply disable it. If you do use it (e.g. you search indexed areas often), you can change its power management options in the Control Panel, so that it doesn't suck down so much power when the computer is idle; this will make the indexing process take longer, but it won't use as much power. As for the games, are you sure it isn't the video driver? There are several documented issues with slightly out-of-date nVidia drivers and Vista; I think they've been mostly ironed out, but some of the slowdowns were pretty significant, on some hardware. For comparison, I run Battlefield 2 at 1024 × 768, 32 bit colour, full view depth, full geometric detail, full lighting, and low effects (that's for gameplay advantage...) on a four-year-old video card, under Vista, sometimes with Outlook and Pro/E running. And I can still get 25-40 FPS consistently.

Originally Posted by JBotAlan

Not to mention everything has been moved. Something that was 3 clicks away in XP is now buried under new headings in the Control Panel.

This is a pain, but the old Control Panel is still there, if desired, and the search box is very good within the Control Panel.

[Kingofl337]

Just so you know....

With Vista to XP you are looking to "upgrade" to a more familiar user experience.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0UwO9JWTxQ

With Windows to Linux you are looking to "upgrade" to a more challenging user experience.

[keen101]

Originally Posted by Kingofl337

Just so you know....

With Windows to Linux you are looking to "upgrade" to a more challenging user experience.

More challenging? Perhaps in some regard, but one might argue that it's worth the effort. It certainly was for me. Besides, the community is great at helping people out. Far better than the windows community in my experience.

...But, whatever works best for you.

[trekkiencc74656]

Dont go to Linux, Microsoft products are the reason that I have a job. I cant see why you wouldnt like vista I've been using it since longhorn alpha release which was still pretty much just xp and I loved it. It has always been better than xp you just have to get used to it. Like it was said before the reason vista seems to use more memory is just that it uses it more efficiently.

[Phalanx]

Don't go to Microsoft. Microsoft products are the reason I have very little hair left on my head. IMO they are consistently buggy, bloated, unreliable, overly resource intensive, overly proprietary, don't play well with other NON-Microsoft products, and lastly support for Joe Q public individual stinks.

You're better off with just about anything else by anyone else. IMO

Go Linux if your able. I'm fortunate that my company has decided to retire and eliminate all requirements for MS based products and move all "Mission Critical" applications to Linux for the very reasons I've stated.

[mbarina]

Make sure this is really what you want to do.
First you need to back up any files that you have on your laptop you want to keep on CD or DVD.
Check and see if your system is 32 bit or 64 bit. Xp you will need to know which one you have to install the right version.
Clean/reformat your hard drive. Partition it the way you want it.
Install XP

There are mixed feelings with Vista. I know people who love it but others who are having problems with it because of hardware incompatibilities and crashes.
AS for me, I love XP. Until the bugs are out of VISTA - I will not install it on my system.

[trekkiencc74656]

Whatever you do dont install xp 64bit its probably the worst os since ME nothing supports it and never will 64bit vista drivers and 32bit drivers dont work with it. You would be lucky to find any drivers at all for it. There are also very few updates for it. If you want 64bit you are much better off with vista because those drivers will be easier to find. I would suggest that if you havent already purchased MS office go with open office. This is because the number of security vulnerabilities in MS office is triple that of xp sp1. office 2007 is the worst. Oh and as long as you dont download anything that says "This is not spyware" you'll be fine because legit companies wont say that.

[Nightfall831]

i agree with the upgrade to linux...i run ubuntu on my desktop, however i can't on my laptop because linux + dells = death, and i was too dumb to buy one of the linux notebooks from dell....

i also wanted to go to xp on my laptop which came with vista home premium...after installing i realized i needed a bunch of drivers...too much trouble if you ask me...it really depends on what you're gonna do with that computer. i realized that i wanted my laptop for just doing work like building our team's website and such...

for the record...i don't see what all the fuss is about with vista...if anyone is having trouble with it i think you may have other problems you should deal with first...

[Laaba 80]

Hey Guys, I know its a little off topic, but this is the closest thread to my question. I just got a new laptop with vista. I am wondering if the programming software that comes with the kit MP LAB will work on it. I was on Microchips website and couldnt find anything that says it doesnt work on vista, so I decided to ask here. Any info helps, thanks.

[trekkiencc74656]

Originally Posted by Laaba 80

Hey Guys, I know its a little off topic, but this is the closest thread to my question. I just got a new laptop with vista. I am wondering if the programming software that comes with the kit MP LAB will work on it. I was on Microchips website and couldnt find anything that says it doesnt work on vista, so I decided to ask here. Any info helps, thanks.

Yes it will I am using it on a vista system right now and have had no problems

[Laaba 80]

Originally Posted by trekkiencc74656

Yes it will I am using it on a vista system right now and have had no problems

Thanks