Win Vista or Win XP?

Currently im using win vista business on my Vostro 1500.
I think it looks great, but it really is demanding. I play an ugly mmo-rpg 2d game called Tibia. Every time i hear the harddrive click, the character on the screen stops for 0.5 seconds. This is annoying.
It also happens for me in Test drive: Unlimited. The game stops up for a second.

I have the 5400rpm harddrive. Do you think it would be solved by installing Win XP? Or should i try getting a 7200rpm harddrive?

I really like the look of win vista, the dashboard, the configurable activity bar (colors), aero, and it feels more modern than XP.

 

In game performance is not affected by hard drive speed (or not enough to be significant).

Vista's memory usage does play a part though and its memory hogging would slow your game down.

Seen though you already have Vista and like it apart from these issues, I'd go about finding tweaks or finding ways to reduce resource consumption, either permanently or temporary. When playing games, I also tend to close down everything that isn't necessary, e.g. explorer.exe, antivirus, firewall etc. and that makes a noticeable impact on XP.

Another option is dual booting XP/Vista.

 

I can't understand why people say vista is such a memory hog. Of course I know that windows search, readyboost and superfetch are the culprits, but I always have those disabled. One a fresh reboot, I consistently get about ~250mb cached when I get to the desktop (according to task manager anyway). That is having about 34 services running in the background, including antivirus. My computer is fast, even feels faster than when I had xp.
I have 2gb of ram, and even for a few days once, just to see what would happen, I ran vista with no pagefile, and never had a problem. That is even with gaming.
Just disable that god-aweful superfetch and readyboost, and windows search (if you don't mind having slow searches), and it should significantly improve your memory usage.
Your 5400 rpm hard drive should be ok I would think. Mine is 7200 though and I have no problems.
It just could be, that your memory usage is higher and therefore has to cache more from the hard disk. Maybe that's why you're experiencing those hiccups. That's been my past experience anyway.
Also try updating your video card drivers, that could make a huge difference.
But I would say, you really should just save your money since you already have vista. And Dell's OS's never have to be activated when used on a Dell, another plus.

 

Whoa, sorry for the double post, that was weird. My post suddenly disappeared then reappeared for no reason.

 

I have 163.44.

Superfetch? Readyboost?

 

They are features of Windows Vista that supposedly improve performance by making compromises, and can lead to a bad overall performance depending on your usage.

talin29, the post disappearing happens when you go back because of the AJAX call when replying. Do a refresh if you don't see your post

 

Yes, new vista "features" that are responsible for such heavy memory usage.
Just I've been able to get vista to xp levels when it comes to memory/resource usage.
Many people would probably disagree with me, but in my opinion it's not useful. But I'm "old skooool".

 

Ahh that was it! Thanks.

 

One more thing, although I wouldn't necessarily recommend it, many people seem to find it useful (although I don't ever use it), and that is to maybe disable system restore.
One time after a fresh reinstall of vista, I had forgotten to disable system restore as I always do, and I was playing a game, and suddenly for no reason, my game was slowing down really badly and hard disk activity was crazy, until I realized, that for some reason vista thought it was necessary to make a restore point *while I was gaming*. Strange indeed.