Downgrade to Win XP for NP8660?

Hi, I am new here and have ordered a NP8660. I was wondering if I should downgrade to Win XP from vista. I have never use vista before but have heard lots of bad stuff about it. I would appreciate any advice to the following points:-

- would I still be able to maximize the potential of my 8660 with win XP?
- is there any significant improvement with vista over win XP on 8660?
- if I choose to downgrade to XP, I read that it would not be easy. Is there a guide that I can follow?

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

Hi, I am in the same situation you are in. However, I would recommend waiting until you have the the laptop for a few days and play around with it first. Don't just take everyone's word for "how stupid" Vista is. For example, when XP first came out, I remember everyone saying that it was horrible. After I finally got a PC with XP on it, I grew to love it! It might turn out the same way with Vista for me. Make up your own mind after a few days with it. That's what I'm going to do (except I'll have a dual-boot of XP Home to fall back on).

 

vista is actually very compitent now. I have no trouble with it after the service pack was installed. Keep vista.

 

I agree, though I will try to install XP. I have thousands of older PC games (yes) and while I will probably never play again most of them and many of them would work under Vista 64, it might be a good idea to have a XP partition too, say 20GBs.
At least that's the plan, will see.

 

Don't hold back the wheels of progress. Go with Vista and never go back.

Remember the same crowd who wanted to stay with windows 98 and didn't want to go with XP. Well guess what, they are using XP now.

 

Deathwinger: Yeah, that's what I was talking about in my post. However, it's sad to think that the same Win98-to-XP crowd are now fighting tooth and claw against Vista for the same reason: it's just different than what we're used to. I personally am going to decide for myself whether Vista is better than XP, after I've used it a little while. Then, if I like it, I don't care WHO says "Vista is terrible," because they'll be wrong.

 

You can see a little performance increase but that's all.

I say, if your PC came with Vista, just keep it. If you are running on XP, don't upgrade.

 

As an XP user myself, I know that I'll have to switch to Vista in the near future future, so I, too, recommend you go with Vista.

 

thats a very good conclusion. I will give you rep when i have some available and if i remember to.

 

O_O' I must have missed something, did they stop including the drivers for xp and vista on the driver cd? I know mine has vista and xp drivers on it.

 

Let’s hope it’s that way in the future, but right now XP all the way!

 

Yup, another vote for XP here. It's stable, fast and secure enough if you don't engage in risky behavior online or with email attachments.

Both my Acers came with Vista installed and I didn't have a problem with it unless I was trying to shut them down. The act of shutting down took 3-5 minutes or until I got tired of waiting and yanked out the battery. I'm not that patient a person so I installed XP Pro on both.

 

Always go with the newest OS with your new computer. People who dislike vista are afraid of the change, it happened when the windows 98 first came out, it happened when the windows millennium came out and it also happened when the windows xp came out. They either don't have a computer fast enough to run the OS, or they just got influenced by the massive amount of people don't have a system fast enough to run vista.

And if you know about xp don't be afraid of vista, vista does everything xp does with added security and a prettier interface.

Hope you enjoy your new laptop and your new OS!

 

I think I heard it somewhere that the vista is not designed to get shut down all the time, if you hibernate or put your laptop to sleep would be much faster.

 

You know you can edit a post right? Be nice not seeing two-three post from you every time.

As for vista you can defiantly tell the difference in fps. The max fps may not be very different, but the average and lowest fps are very noticeable. I always noticed when playing with vista that my fps would be great going at 60 fps and then plummeting to the 20 fps and jumping back up. You will defiantly notice something like that. Especially when you are playing online games like COD4 and UT3

 

Sorry, I respectfully disagree.

Most everyone in the Sager/Clevo sub-forum has a notebook/desktop that’s more than fast enough to run Vista, myself included. I loved Vista; it made everything look so pretty. But wanting to grab my D810 because I thought it was more responsive made me change Vista to XP just to see why that is so, and now I know. I’m not reverting back to XP because I’m scared of change, I’m reverting back because I just like it better. I’m not sticking with anything that seems to slow me down just because it’s new, if I know I have something older that will at least give me the impression of being faster. Speaking for myself here…My computer experience is much better having XP installed on my computer, so why would I have Vista just because it’s newer? Don’t try and answer that, my mind is made up on what I will be keeping.

Boy this thing is fast! I almost couldn’t say that and believe it a few days ago.


EDIT: And the reason why I didn’t want to upgrade from 98 to xp, it was buggy as heck when it came out. Not only that, but games were also slower at the beginning. Good thing they made a tweak to run Doom 3 with 98, that helped me keep 98 as long as possible.

 

Thanks for the advice.

I think I may try out vista first but do a partition for XP. However, I am pretty sure my retail win XP installation disc does not come with SATA drivers and I am pretty new to this SATA standard. How can I do a full SATA win XP installation?

 

With my Clevo, I didn’t have to use any other drivers. In the BIOS, I just set the hard drive to auto and WINXP installed without a problem and didn’t require any added drivers.


By no means am I suggesting not to try the new operating system, YMMV.

 

i'll have to disagree with this..

i'm using 3 OS at the moment, on 3 different ststems.. XP Pro, Vista 32, and Vista 64..

yes, the aero and looks of the vista gives you the modern day feeling, but i somehow feel that it still takes up a whole lot more resources than xp.

while i had the initial problem of getting drivers that were vista 32 bit compatible, the problem started to go away when they released their 1st service pack.. (tho now i still have problems with certain drivers like my all-in-one printer) then i got a systrem running on vista 64(see sig below), and i can't even get my normal printer to work with this.. which means that my super old and trustworthy XP laptop is still being used quite often to get some printing done.

xp is still simple, basic, with very little problems and microsoft has extended their service to xp users till 2012 (or is it 2014).. which means that updates and all that will still be released for XP, so no need to worry about it being 'outdated' at the moment.

vista supports DX10, nicer graphics, lower fps, but if you don't NEED DX10, then go with XP.. i don't really see a need for DX10, but just to lazy go go downgrade it.. its on microsoft's website if you want to downgrade to XP, they'll tell you what to do. the only mistake was building my desktop with vista32..

bottom line: if u really NEED DX10, then vista 32. no need DX10, take XP.
or if you wanna do a dual boot config, then you can have best of both worlds (i don't know how to do this.. will ask for help when my 2nd and 3rd HDD arrives)

 

XP - all flavors - gets extended security support until 2014; _Vista non-business editions only get it until 2012 (business editions get it until 2017).

 

I'd say definitely go the XP route. Everything is much snappier, much more streamlined, you can make the most of the resources you have paid for rather than letting the OS suck them all up with little benefit, it's more stable and things are easier to accomplish before Microsoft moved everything around in the name of ease.

My new desktop is a pretty powerful desktop, or so I like to think, and I requested it come with both Vista and XP. The machine is perfectly capable of running Vista, but I found myself always booting into XP. There was nothing Vista had that wasn't in XP, but there's plenty of downsides to booting into Vista. XP is much lighter on resources, leaving more resources for your programs and games (afterall, an OS is there to run programs!) , it's less bloaty, it's faster to startup, shutdown and just in normal operation everything happens instantly and very snappily.

I soon found the Vista partition untouched and killed it off as I didnt need it anymore. If Vista doesnt offer anything you want (and face it, it probably doesnt. The eye candy gets boring quickly, and can be done on XP anyway, and other than that, there's not much that cant be done better on XP, or which you can get a third party program to do better). go with XP and enjoy having free RAM, snappier responses, better performance, less time spent waiting, and less time battling with an inferior operating system.

 

o.0 thx for the confirmation. now i'm gonna get my hands on xp again.

 

dude vista was 100% ok about a month after launch... i find it horible the rep its got its a rocksolid gaming OS... with out even talking about DX10..

use vista.. seriously.. you are ruining the potential of your 9800m GT by not learning about afue changes in vista that once u get a hold of will not bother you ever again.

but seriously if you cant handle the change.. i think you got the wrong speced laptop ... the enthusiast adapts the hobbiest savors

 

I fell in love with XP the first time I used it while I was on holiday and I actually went out and.. Acquired it straight away so I could install it when I got home.

I don't get that same feeling with Vista. All the permissions drive me nuts.

 

It seems like vista gets a bad rep because of the ram it takes up. Now correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Vista uses all of this ram when it isn't needed by any other applications. Once there is a program that needs to use the ram, then Vista will release it.

Have you ever seen your % of used ram go above 60%? I haven't.

And as Heath said, you need vista for DX10. There's an advantage.

 

If you have 2GB RAM, you are fine. Its uses around 50% on my computer with all my apps opened. Everyone complains about Vista because its new, they are not used to it and are too lazy to get the Admin account so they get the same priviledges as in XP.

If you want something light on resources, just use Win2k, Win98 or Xubuntu

 

Interesting how Microsoft just produces a new piece of software and ... all of a sudden it becomes "the wheels of progress"! Wow! I really, sincerely, wish I had clients like Deathwinger to always take the view that when my company produces a new service, it is not just Varadero LLC looking for a new thing to sell but ... (take a deep breath) giving "progress" to humanity. Do any of you wonder why this 'progress' means that I need a brand new rig, just to run an operating system at the same speed as the old one? In return for ... (basically) eye candy (sorry, don't buy the security story).

To the other posters about 'afraid of change' - on this forum we're talking to people who buy Centrino 2 within hours of Intel's launch, and can't wait to have 1066MHz front serial buses in laptops - hardly a change averse crowd? To the wider world, what on earth is there to be 'afraid' of with Vista? It caters to the total moron - it is like a dumb, robotic nanny. "Do you really want to copy this file?", "Are you absolutely sure?" "You must need help with the frightening complexity of creating a user account?". If you're afraid of change, you would probably avoid Linux rather than Vista.

I dumped Vista after 2 weeks. Pound for pound, XP does everything faster. Fewer processes. Zero backward compatibility issues. All my favorite apps run. Shame on Microsoft for infecting Vista's DNA with Digital Rights Management - XP does not 'degrade' my image because it does not approve of my ext monitor/any other hardware. If MS is on a mission to save the film industry, it is welcome to make donations. DRM no-record flags? Remote driver revocation? Sorry, better luck with Se7en.

DX10. Again, this is a Clevo forum, so barring those with 901 SLIs, at best we can run games maxed out on DX9. To get DX10 you need to turn down the resolution, AA etc ... which rather defeats the point of DX10.

And finally - XP works fine with SATA. The only problem is hotswapping esata. I have a 570TU and did a clean install painlessly.

 

On the cover of the new issue of Maximum PC:

"Inside Microsoft's $6 Billion Failure

Microsoft bares all, telling us what went wrong with Vista & how they fixed the problems. "


Should be some interesting reading.

 

Seriously, do you buy DRM music? I had 1 movie that had a digital copy, just needed to enter a serial and it was good to go. And now, most music sellers don't use DRM anymore.

 

if your downgrading to xp you may have to slipstream the intel matrix driver because of the eSATA I think it has to do with. Either you can run in AHCI mode and do the slipstream or reformat and don't use AHCI. I wanted both Vista and XP in AHCI so I made a new disck with nLite and it worked right away. Otherwise it gave me an error during XP setup. Fortunately Someone over at XOTICPC knew what I should do, and fortunately I knew how to do it

 

No, I don't buy DRM music - my gripe is that Vista accepts 'don't record' commands from broadcast media. Unless I'm mistaken, I paid MS to give me an OS, and not to override my instructions in favor of Media Mega Corp Inc. MS also forces me to become a pirate because it does not approve of my external monitor. The only way to watch 1080p on Vista is if it kindly approves of all your hardware ('handshakes' it). So I actually had a legal blu ray disc, a legal Vista O/S but could not watch it at good resolution. Amazingly, Vista downgraded the image deliberately! My neighbor downloaded the very same movie via torrent on XP and he said he had a 'fantastic' time watching it the other night with WMC (while I was wondering what setting I had wrong with PowerDVD/Vista until 1am). When that clicked, it was enough to make me use Darik's Boot & Nuke on this treacherous operating system.

DRM in Vista is like paying 30,000 dollars for a factory new car, starting to drive it, and suddenly getting a message flash up on the dash: "We're sorry, Ford has decided to limit your speed on this journey to 12 mph because according to the GPS, the direction you appear to be heading is one where there are known counterfeit goods vendors". Would that be a car you would want? I really hope MS ditches this line of 'thinking' with Se7en.