Benefit of having XP on Gateway P-6831FX Laptop

So I was looking over the discussion board and have come across many people saying they are working on installing windows XP on their P-6831FX laptop from Gateway. I myself recently bought this laptop and was wanting to know if anyone could explain to me what the benefits or the pros and cons if you will, of having XP instead of the pre-installed Vista Home Premium.

Thanks!

 

Some people are still not ready for change, and see no reason to leave a consistent OS for one that is unproven with their machine. If it works great for you, I personally see no reason why you should change.

 

And don't forget the fact that Vista is a bigger RAM hog, and has problems running some programs. XP's problems in that area are largely fixed due to the fact that it's been around for several years.

It's not necessarily about being unready for change.

 

At this point, most programs that can't run on Vista have upgrades/patches/new versions that will. As far as RAM goes, most new machines come with 1gb plus, which is fine for Vista. Many people consider it a RAM hog because it uses memory that would otherwise sit there unused. Vista is much better at memory management than XP.

By not ready for change, I meant that some people don't see a reason to switch from a stable, reliable system. It makes sense...but in my opinion that's not a great reason to switch to XP on a brand new machine. That is especially true if you have to go out of your way to find a license for XP.

 

Please know the facts before talking.

Vista uses RAM in a completely different way than XP. Vista, over time, recognizes the programs and applications you use most often, and hence, it caches the .exe of those programs into RAM so that you may access them faster. And if you happen to start something that needs the RAM already allocated to the .exes, then Vista will free up RAM as needed. Simple as that.

Unused RAM is wasted RAM.

 

@ Matt
Firstly, I know that. Not that it makes any difference to you. You could run XP on 512MB of ram decently, especially if it's not intensive usage. Vista will run slower on 512MB of ram in comparison, intensive usage or otherwise. An extreme comparison perhaps, but my point still stands.

Secondly, a lot of new machines also come with 1 GB of ram or even less, particularly lower end machines. It doesn't really affect this particular laptop in question since it's got 3 GB.

Thank you for talking.

@ttupa
A lot of programs have patches to make them Vista compatible. And I do agree with you ttupa, people do prefer sticking to XP as they don't see a reason for switching from something they consider perfectly fine. Personally, I'm on the fence for this one. I can see the points of keeping XP or 'downgrading' to it, but Vista also allows you to options such as DX10 or a prettier GUI. I work around it by running Vista and XP on two different machines. Sometimes nostalgia strikes me and I would like to play older games, that's where XP comes in perfectly.

XP's in-game performance also tends to be better, slightly or otherwise. Or at least that's the result of most of the benchmarks I've seen. Since most people who bought the 6831FX are likely to be gaming on it, they might prefer to game on XP instead.