The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.

    Vista-32 To Xp--pro

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by hawaiidell101, Dec 13, 2008.

  1. hawaiidell101

    hawaiidell101 Newbie

    Reputations:
    0
    Messages:
    4
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    5
    Was curious on the performance perhaps gained from switching my Operating system from Vist-32 Bit To XP--Pro on my XPS M1730
    Build- Raid-0 ( 2--128GB ) =256GB Solid State Drives-- 4-GB Ram DDR-2
    2.8 GHZ overclocable to 3.4GHZ.
    It is kind of a pass tense senario now after contacting Dell- If it is not an option upon purchase then Any Warranty is Fully Voided With-out Void :)
    Hey Maybe after my Warranty is Up I can experiment then.
     
  2. Wishmaker

    Wishmaker BBQ Expert

    Reputations:
    379
    Messages:
    1,848
    Likes Received:
    35
    Trophy Points:
    66
    My system is not as fast as yours but I will tell you how mine behaved in the 1 hour I used XP+SP3.

    1. 4GB on XP 32 is not the same as 4GB on Vista 32. By this I mean that on the latter memory allocation is better. XP is snappy, sure, but as soon as you hit 900 MB ram usage it starts slowing down badly.
    2. All the fancy Dell apps you have on Vista will look like crap on XP and will perform worse than on Vista.
    3. My HDD was using a driver from 2001. No matter what I did, windows did not let me update it. Thus, performance was very poor on SATA Enhanced mode. Intel Storage Manager did not make a difference.


    So, coming from a die hard XP fan and a Vista hater, XP is not as fast as one would think. , it hurt to say this :p.
     
  3. K-TRON

    K-TRON Hi, I'm Jimmy Diesel ^_^

    Reputations:
    4,412
    Messages:
    8,077
    Likes Received:
    2
    Trophy Points:
    205
    Xp is a little snappier, but not by much.
    The main problem you are going to have, is finding XP drivers for your machine. I believe Dell only sold the XPS1730 with vista, so dell probably does not have any xp drivers for the machine on their website.

    Oh,
    changing the operating system does not void the warranty on dell computers.
    I changed my operating system from Vista to XP. When I needed tech support, cause my touchpad died, they asked me if I modified my system in any way. I told them I simply changed the operating system to XP.
    They said okay, and within a day they came to replace my touchpad.

    K-TRON
     
  4. Deks

    Deks Notebook Prophet

    Reputations:
    1,272
    Messages:
    5,201
    Likes Received:
    2,073
    Trophy Points:
    331
    You can always download (usually latest) drivers from manufacturers sites.
    Go into device manager, see what hardware is installed (names/numbers), go online, to the manuf. sites and download XP drivers.
    That should solve your problems and possibly speed things up quite a bit.

    Companies that issue new laptops, rarely or never put up XP drivers on their site because from their perspective it's 'outdated'.
     
  5. Apollo13

    Apollo13 100% 16:10 Screens

    Reputations:
    1,432
    Messages:
    2,578
    Likes Received:
    210
    Trophy Points:
    81
    You may also be able to get the drivers from Dell's sources for other laptops, since in many cases the same or sufficiently similar parts are offered - try the XPS 1710 or Inspiron 1720. Sometimes the Vista drivers work, too, as I found out accidently last year.

    I doubt you'd actually see much of a performance increase - the primary reason to switch OS'es is when things don't work. You've got a powerful enough system that any difference would be pretty small.

    Not sure what exactly Wishmaker means; I'm running XP x32 (and have been for nearly a year now) with 4 GB for the past two months, 2 GB before that, and have never noticed a slowdown even when using more than 2500 megabytes of RAM at a time. Maybe it has something to do with the page file. I've had that disabled for four months now since I didn't need it, but even when I had it on and had 2 GB of RAM I didn't notice any slowdowns when I got up near 2 GB usage.
     
  6. Michel.K

    Michel.K 167WAISIQ

    Reputations:
    353
    Messages:
    1,216
    Likes Received:
    0
    Trophy Points:
    55
    You won't gain any performance nor lose any i'd say, or maybe lose some performance as the driversupport maybe isn't as good as with vista as it's sold with Vista.
    Vista is as fast as XP in any way. I wonder why people still think it's slower than XP? Vista is not new and on a beta stage and does not have bad driver support nowadays, so i don't see the problem staying with it :)

    But I guess many people aren't willing to get used to how vista looks and has it's layout compared to XP.

    And btw, as XP is very old it does not handle memory as good as vista does.


    And another note.
    My system in sign is as fast in XP as it is in Vista, so i don't know why a faster system (as the OP's) wouldn't handle it as good as my "slow" system :)

    And i guess this thread will start to be a XP vs Vista thread.