M4500 with XP Downgrade Problems?

I've had an M4500 on order since 4/12 !! with the 64 Gb SSD and a 500 Gb HDD. It was supposed to ship last week but still showed as In Production on Monday. I called and they couldn't see any reason it hadn't gone so they changed it to Overnight.
The night it should have shipped the delivery was pushed back 10 days!
Now expediting says there is a note in their system that there is some unspecified problem with the XP downgrade I ordered. Yes, I will eventually go Win 7 but we have some software that isn't certified on it so I was planning to set up a dual boot after I got the machine.

Has anyone gotten an M4500 with this configuration? or heard of problems with XP and the dual drive configuration? I hate the thought that I may be setting myself up for a world of hurt if they ever do ship this.

-Mike

 

Why not just go with Win 7 and then use the built in XP Mode for your older applications?

 

If you have a Dell OEM Windows XP disk, there's no reason to officially order the downgrade. I wouldn't be surprised that the XP downgrade is causing a problem. I think it's too late to do anything though.

 

XP is highly not recommended for new systems.. especially those with SSD's.. unless you are ready to to trow it in the bin within a year or two if you are lucky.
If you are going to XP, might as well return your laptop and get a Pentium M powered laptop, at LEAST you wont' be be trowing money away with wasted features.

XP doesn't know what PCI-E is, same for SATA, eSATA, display port, SSD, and many other technology found on your laptop. You are asking for BIG trouble. Hence why I offer no support to XP users on any system that has technology features after mid 2005.

Go and buy Windows 7, or get the 90-day trial of Win7 Enterprise (it's a different name for Professional edition) while you get your Windows 7 and install the 64-bit version.

 

By whom?

Considering over two thirds of SSD manufacturers market are XP users, by your reckoning they will be in for some expensive replacements over the next couple of years, especially as most have a 3 year+ warranty.
Any half decent SSD will have some sort of self healing like mine does, where it deals with used cells while idle and independant of OS used.Can't say I've noticed a scrap of performance difference over the time I've used one with XP.
eSata works fine on my M4400, as does Sata/ahci, and a SSD primary with secondary hard drives for the last 5 or 6 months, don't know about displayport as I don't have a displayport monitor, but a quick google bought up no issues for XP any more than any other OS.

The guy has windows 7 coming with his new notebook, as microsoft won't sell you XP without selling one of their newer versions.
His problems sound more like an excuse than anything, maybe there is a problem with PCIe SSD and XP, it will be the first real problem I've heard of outside of the usual "chicken little" XP disadvantages soo common on this forum by people that haven't even used XP with SSD's.

If there is a problem, they had better address it or make it plain that the minicard SSD is not an option on XP, especially considering how popular XP remains with enterprise and the majority of pc users.

 

Me.

Hmm no... not true.. the SSD market on XP users is a niche market. and that is not my problem, if they enjoy screwing their SSD's.

The problem with XP is that, no mater how much RAM you have.. the OS acts as if you are low in memory.. as it's was optimized for system with under 512MB of RAM. As soon as you minimize an application it starts dumping everything to the page file, hence why XP consumes much less memory than Vista/Win7. Vista/Win7 behavior is simple... if you are low in memory, THEN use the page file. Also it also explains why if you have 1GB of RAM or you jump to 2 or 4GB, you don't see any performance increase as page file is always in use. The solution is a hack... where you basically "disable" page file (you can't really disable it, it just minimizes it). But despite this, it STILL dumps everything that little bit of page file size it has, until the page file is full.

XP on your dear little laptop or pre-made system works fine, because the needed drivers were shoved into XP Throat. If you have a stand alone retail XP, this is where the fun starts.

So you install your dear old 2001 XP on your new system, seams works fine.. installs fine. It loads for the first time, and what do you have? the system is extremely slow, 16 colors, and everything you run is corrupted or invalid Win32 application.

Fix corruption problem:
- Get an internal floppy drive (can't be external as XP setup doesn't know what USB is nor support reading from disk), and 1 to 4 floppies (rare and expensive), connect the floppy drive to a working computer, and get SATA drivers for your new computer SATA controller, and put them on the floppy (multiple floppies might be required).
Now take all that and put it on the new computer, now When the setup loads, you will be asked to press F6 to install additional drivers. The time delay of this message is based on the clock cycle of your system... faster your CPU the less time you have... In my case, on my computer on my signature I have about 1 sec. For faster computer you will need to down-clock your CPU via the BIOS. Once done, and lucky enough to press F6 (By the way, pressing and holding F6 doesn't work.. it detects Key-Up, not key down action.. so you have to tap F6 really fast) you load your drivers.

Once all done, CONGRATULATION, now XP can use SAFE MODE (or IDE mode), of your SATA controller.. you wont' get near it's full speed, but at least nothing is corrupted.

Now you can start installing your drivers, once XP is installed. but wait you are stuck with 16 beautiful colors! Well here is the fun part. You need to install FIRST your motherboard drivers to allow the system to know what PCI-E is. Once done you'll have the choice between 800x600 screen resolution and have the option for 256 colors.
Once done, and your computer restarted, you need to install your graphic card drivers. NOW you get proper visuals.

Good now you are ready to install the rest of the drivers. Once done, and that means that the drivers works without SP2 (you might delay this until after you finish downloading all the updates). You start activating Windows, and installing all Windows update with the crappy Windows Update, updater. Once done, restart your computer and repeat, restart and repeat, now you access to SP1. YAY! Install SP1, do the intermediate update and jump to SP2, and do the same for SP3. It's been now a day an half you are install Windows, despite a 30Mbps broadband connection

Now install the remaining updates, and drivers. Once done, NOW you can start disabling prefetch technology via registry hack, to set it only to do it for boot. Because XP prefetch technology is designed for system with low (<=256MB of RAM), and that hurts your system performance during load up.

Now to maximize performance, you need to remove all un-needed font's as XP loves to load and cache EVERY font you have at startup (cache is cleared at shutdown, and cache is stored on the HDD and not RAM).

Now, disable services in XP, because Services in XP and older Windows, world, is more of a background process rather than a OnEvent call. So more services degrades startup/wake-up/sleep/shutdown performance.

Ok now you are good.
Now you can enjoy a OS, that can't use your 64-bit CPU, you can use TRIM as it doesn't know how to use it, your SATA controller goes under safe mode type of mode and doesn't go full speed, and the OS itself is designed for single core processors, meaning that the best you can get out of your multiple core system is have a software run on the other processor, and not be able to use all processors simultaneously to perform it's work faster.

Now, I can't deny that your SSD comes with drivers that performs some sort of emulation under XP to try and keep XP from trashing it. Which doesn't really help as your SSD performance degrade over time. Something that doesn't occur under Win7.

Now to maximize performance of your system, remove your wallpaper and don't move or scale windows and applications while it's processing. Why? because the interface is all drawn by your CPU.. something that it was NEVER designed to do, hence why we need GRAPHIC CARDS! Of course, I don't blame Microsoft for this, I mean back in 90's and early 2000's, graphic cards were very expensive for very little performance. Intel intergarted graphic solution back teh days did not even have a GPU of any sorts, it was doing exactly like a onboard sound card does today. It prepares the information to be processed, give it to the CPU, and grabs it back for re-assembling and outputs it on your monitor. Sound is really easy to process. graphics... oh boy.. Don't believe me? Just open task manager, and take a window, any and move it all around your desktop... yup just move it, and you will see that your CPU will spike at 100% (well one of your CPU will spike at 100%, as the OS is single core).

There now you can somewhat enjoy your XP on your new system. With the abysmal network management, the broken and extremely slow sleep/wake-up system, lack of any advance power management features. And let's not forget all the security issues, and firewall protection that informs you about a process accessing the internet AFTER it has access the net (yes thanks!)

Now, you know why I hate XP on new systems.

Let's compare to Win7.
- Install Win7.. 25-30min on a laptop with a 5400RPM HDD.
- Do Windows updates (wireless and wired network card already detected and drivers installed).
- Your done, ready to install the rest of any missing drivers that is for your system specifically, like the ambient light sensor, and install your software. Your done in half a day at worst.

This is changing very rapidly. More and more businesses, schools and universities are switching to Win7 as we speak. That is also what I am doing at my work, we are upgrading systems to make them Win7 ready, getting new systems to replace outdated ones that are about to break and can't find any replacement parts anymore (warranty also finished).

2 months ago, Win7 has over 10% of the market share world wide. This is HUGE. It won't surprise me if it research 15% today.
43% of all the employees in our businesses already have Win7 installed on at least one of their system they use (weather there laptop or home computer desktop), based on our survey. Hence why we feel comfortable to switch all the computers to Win7. Which will follow with training, of course, as it is a requirement.

 

Thanks for the responses.

Dell is starting to fess up to the "chance" that they are having a problem with this configuration!

Give me a break. It took them 5 weeks after order to figure out that they couldn't make this work.

Unfortunately, the CAD program version we are currently running is not supported in Win 7. Only the latest version is. Because all users MUST be on the same version (files are not backwards compatibly) changing over is a big deal in that you have to be sure the new version runs on older equipment that people may have.

My first plan after receiving this was to install Win 7 as a dual boot and see if I could the CAD software to work well enough to use. However, I need XP at first because I can't risk getting new machines that can't run the software I need.

 

that's the stupidest thing I've ever read.

Just ask them to cancel the order or ship it without XP.


CAD won't work great in XP mode because of lack of good 3d support. It 'may' work better in VMWare Workstation 7 since it does offer some 3d support. I would recommend giving the trial version a try and see how it works for you once you get the machine.

 

Well, considering that you are asking them to ship modern hardware with a nearly 10-year-old OS, I'm not surprised that there are going to be problems.

As for the compatibility with Windows 7, have you tried it? A lot of programs are not officially compatible, but still work. This was more of a problem when I first switched to Vista, but I did some workarounds which included copying the program if the installer complains or running the installer/program in compatibility mode.

 

Correct for both of you.

another trick, is to simply give the folder to yourself (where the program is installed) full rights (or install it in a different partition, anywhere away from C:\ which require admin permissions almost anywhere)