Stick with Vista or slide back to XP?

A question for you all... just got a T400 with Vista Business 32 and while waiting for the Win7 release should I just downgrade to XP Pro or stick with Vista?

To be honest I'm scared of Vista Having heard so many stories about what a clunky and bloated OS it is. XP is faster overall, no doubt, but if I tweak Vista sufficiently (using blackviper tips etc.) and remove all the Lenovo crapola will I really notice a difference? Moreover, is it really worth the hassle of downgrading for a few months before installing Win7 (which requires existing OS to be removed anyway)?

 

Vista really isn't as bad as many say it is; after you uninstall some of the unnecessary Lenovo ThinkVantage tools, it'll run very well.

You could downgrade to XP, at the cost of shorter battery lifetime and loss of switchable graphics without a reboot. Personally, I would suggest uninstalling the Lenovo tools you don't use (Access Connections, System Update, Message Center, etc) and sticking with Vista.

 

Aside from the network UI...Vista is fine and can provide a better end experience than XP if you have the system to run it and the tweaks you want in place. Out of the box pre the Service Packs use to be a nightmare though .

I disable all the extra fluff.

 

Yeah, most of the negative hype behind Vista is derived from pre-SP1 Vista. SP1 brought many optimizations and fixes that really made Vista a nice OS.

 

Stay with Vista. Just make sure to give it 2GB+ ram. Also there is no point in wasting your time to downgrade if you are going to upgrade to Win 7 very soon. I myself never had any real problems with Vista, just wish it was a little less resource hungry and was a little snappier. But other than that it is ok.

 

I also got vista 32 with my thinkpad and then switched to vista 64. Disable a few services and uninstall the bloatware and guaranteed, it will run faster and more stable than XP. That's been my experience so far, going on 7 months now.

 

Vista it is then... currently got 89 processes running, which is a little excessive, so I have my work cut out optimizing it and removing bloatware. What's a good, lean number of processes? On XP I had it down to about 35.

 

Vista is a great OS if you take the time to learn the changes. I used to not like it and I do admit I was a vista hater in beta and RC because I didn't know that the resources being "used" were actually being cached and not used. Then when I got my first post beta/RC copy on the dell I found that it ran better then XP on the same hardware.

 

I agree with the people that say Vista has primarily had bad publicity. I've done clean installs with both 32 and then 64bit Vista and my T61p has never seen such a clean operating system (except for VMS of course). I've never had a Vista crash.
Renee

 

In case it’s not clear, you can easily upgrade from Vista to 7—it’s only from XP to 7 that requires a clean installation of 7. Also, for what it’s worth, my somewhat clean installation of 7 (I’ve installed several Lenovo Windows 7 beta items) has 45 processes running shortly after startup—and that’s without any tweaking.

 

The vast majority of bashers have literally no idea, have not used it, or simply don't understand the intricacies of operating systems.

Blackviper's tips, eh? Disabling services is moronical and yields no benefit.

XP is not faster or more efficient on current hardware... Vista manages and allocates resources so well you cannot compare the two.

It's also easier to use... things are easier to find... and Aero offloads window composition to the GPU so you don't get blockiness and your CPU can concentrate on actual work.

It's not clunky, it's not 'bloated'. The bad launch came from awful drivers (thanks, NVidia). They were that bad - Vista's driver management is a whole new book compared to XP and drivers can be cycled without a reboot.

 

I hear you... the bloat comes primarily from Lenovo stuff, but the standard installation of any OS usually involves far more services and software than is necessary. Sort of a failsafe installation for the basic user. I'm not fanatical about disabling services, but will stop those that I will never use, pose a security risk, or conflict with other software I have running.

As for speed, from what I've read in various benchmark tests over the last year it still sounds like the latest 32-bit version of XP can generally run a tad faster than a 32-bit versions of Vista (although SP1 closed the gap significantly). Win7 also sounds like it's gonna be generally faster than Vista.