dv9500 Windows XP pro?

So I'm not too pleased with the slowness of my dv9500z. I got it with the Turion 64 TL-62 (2.1GHz) processor, 2GB ram, 8400GS or whatever dedicated graphics but the thing seems to crawl compared to my 1+ year old desktop with an Athlon X2 3800+ (only 2.0GHz) processor and 2GB ram with integrated 6150 graphics.

I've burned the recovery disc and burned a disk with the SWSetup folder. I've ordered the Anytime upgrade disc from CompUsa to try the clean install of Vista. But something tells me I'm still going to be unhappy with the responsiveness of the system.

If I order XP Pro from MS right now, it should be pretty easy to install it over the Vista installation, right? I'm pretty sure I'm able to purchase it still through MS EPP program from my work.

Anyone else installed XP Pro on a dv9500 yet? Any driver issues? Did everything still work -- fingerprint read, webcam, microphone, HDMI port, etc?

 

There is a guide on how to do it stickied in the top of the forum. The main thing you need to be aware of is the guide was written for the Intel setup and not the AMD, so you'll need some different drivers. Other than that my system has both xp pro and vista and both are pretty fast...but then again I have a vid card and not the onboard integrated video. The only problem I had with my XP Pro install was getting online after I was installed. I ended up plugging in a lan cable and ran windows update and got updated. No problems since but I've only got the dual boot working as of Monday so I'm still installing/testing stuff.

 

I also used that guide and it did speed up on Vista. XP is 100x faster than vista because it has lots less features

 

ahh sorry about that. There doesn't seem to be an option to delete my thread. For some reason I saw the x500t and thought it was a completely different model than mine.

I wonder if upping to 4GB of ram would help. I have 32bit Vista Premium though.

What about readyboost? would it help a system with 2GB of ram already?

 

32 bit OS can only support up to 3gbs of ram.
There's various posts that talk about tweaking Vista to run smoother and faster.
Personally i shut off Updates and User Control. I also disabled Indexing and System Restore.

 

If you do some research on Vista you will find a ton of features you can turn off which will allow the OS to run faster.

Microsoft had a slanted idea on how to help the OS run faster, but in its slanted direction they overloaded it with too many features which bog the computer down. A Service Pack is due to be out in the near future which will address a lot of the problems Vista has, and will help speed it up a bit.

 

So I'm in the same boat as the rest of you folks. I have a dv9500 that came with Vista, and the applications I require only run under XP. I have installed XP Pro x64 SP2 after shrinking the partition, etc. I have the same driver issues yet to install which is just manual effort for the most part. The main issue I ran into, is the dual boot. Somehow the boot.ini and the rest of the files got removed when I repaired Vista. I can set the boot to XP, but got errors regarding ntldr and ntdetect.com missing. When replaced through XP repair I still have no boot.ini, so I thought I would read this thread to get some hints. In my ignorance, I cannot locate the procedure "stickied" at the top of the forum. Can someone give me some hints on where to look?
Thanks in advance.

 

If you want to use 4GB of RAM just install a x64 OS version. x64 OEM & retail Vista versions can use the same serial number you were given with the x86.