Contemplating Downgrade to XP Home from Vista Home Prem.

So after experiencing numerous problems with Vista I might go back to XP, for better performance and better compatibility.

Heres my specs:
Toshiba Satellite A215-S7413
AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual-Core TK-53 1.7 GHz
2048MB PC5300 DDR2 (eventually will max out at 4GB)
120 GB SATA (eventually will upgrade, only 19.5 GB left)
ATI Radeon X1200 128MB-319MB
Realtek 802.11b/g
ExpressCard
5-in-1 Bridge Media Adapter

My concerns:
FN functionality lost
Hardware all compatible with XP?

What I do on it:
DVD things
Listen to music while on Firefox, maybe a few tabs open, basic things
Movies, watch them on my TV,have 45 GB of movies right now. I heard Vista degrades video quality? Oh and sometimes DVD's won;t be read in this machine while it will in others (even switched DVD drives)
Use AverMedia HC80 tuner card (not working right now)

Any given time 40% - 60% memory used, Core 1 9% 20%, Core 2 20% - 38%

So what do you think? I mean I like the new visuals, but I use Vistamizer on my PC's and that does a great job and making XP "look" like Vista.

TIA, Phil.

 

I have XP, and it works good. My pc corrupted, so I had to reinstall XP but chose to test with Vista Home Premium instead, and my pc lagged. My pc has a T7700 cpu at 2.4GHz per core, 2GB of RAM and an 8600, and when multitasking like I did in XP, my pc lagged. I went back to XP, and it didn't even stutter one bit. I really do suggest you downgrade to XP, you will get better fps in games, faster response and just better performance in general. Look here at the benchmarks, Vista is a joke...If you need help downgrading just message me, I can help you look for drivers and run you through the process if needed.

 

Thanks for your response. I like change which is why I wanted to go with Vista, but I've been getting frustrated lately with it. With programs not working to hardware that says Vista Certified causing BSOD, I'm just tired of it, I already have enough going on in my life I don't need blinged out Bill Gates slapping me in the face everytime I do something. Oh and thanks for the willingness to help, hard to find these days. I can do the install myself, only the drives is what I'll have trouble with. If I can't find them for XP I'll need to figure out how I'll get the components to work with XP.

 

kinda catch-22?

how about just dual booting?

cheers ...

 

I think dual boot isn't good option as his hard drive space is running out of space....Maybe after you install new hard drive, dual boot is well considering

 

I dunno I might dual boot. Probably after I get a new HD.

 

Actually, with all the updates and stuff, outside of games, Vista works faster. Either you had missing drivers or were running a fully bloated install

The link you linked is also from jan 29th, so outdated.

 

I can A) Wipe th HD and go to XP or B) Reinstall Vista

 

lol no wai! my gateway laptop runs vista as smooth as a bowling ball! with amd intergrated gpu and 2gb of ram. lol dunno what your doing wrong with your set up.

 

C) clone current vista onto a bigger drive and dual boot it

cheers ...

 

Those sound like some pretty bad problems in which case I would say yes, a "downgrade" would help. It's been the single best thing I've done to improve my computer's performance/stability/compatibility, and it sounds like you're having similarly annoying problems with Vista that, based on XP's stellar stability et. al, you don't expect to have. There should be XP drivers for all the components as it is still a supported OS, so I'd say go for it.

Not really. Just one example: resume from Standby. Even with Hybrid Standby in Vista, XP comes back to life much more quickly. And that's without a lot of XP updates and with all the Vista updates and a clean Vista install.

You might want to buy a bigger hard drive at the same time as getting XP. That way you'll only have to install it once instead of once now and once when you get a bigger hard drive.

 

VASHTS121 Please help run me through the downgrade option from vista to xp, i have a new notebook and no idea how to do it properly, can you please email me and maybe you can run me through it i would really appreciate it. [email protected]

 

I dunno but when I dual-booted, I just keep getting a black screen when I woke it up (graphics card not being wake up) under XP. I've always used Vista SP1 on this computer and I know SP1 fixed lots of things with that so I wouldn't know how it was before but all I know is that my C90S can't wake up from sleep under XP and my desktop computer can't wake up from sleep under both XP and Vista.

Only having SP2 installed is a lot of updates

 

****! I hate Micosoft! Well after downgrading to XP and with all my software installed it only takes 2 min from the second i hit the power button, to when the HD is not being accsesed, compare that to Vista at at least 4 minutes. Anyways no I have problems. The main reason to downgrade was so that I could use my non-returnable express card It worked in another laptop I tested it in with XP (clean install) So I figured it was just Vista, but NO it isn't it's this damn PC. I'll fix somehow though. So heres the problems:

ATI Radeon X1200 - No driver on ATI.com and no XP driver from Toshiba, I even Orca'ed it, but it still fails. Trying NGO Optimized Driver. Will Report back.

Wireless - Was having problems but I had to go into the setup.ini to change a few codes. All works well now.

Two unknown devices - SM Bus Controller
Modem Device on High Definition Audio Bus (dial-up I assume)

FN doesn't work

AverTV HC80 ExpressCard Tuner STILL doesn't want to work, I'm about ready to assassinate Toshiba and AverMedia.

Thats about it so far. lol. Gah so many problems latley. Fam, GF, school, jeesh.

I REALLLY appreciate any input. thanks.

Phil

 

Oh may so many responses. Bump.

 

Ok well with nobody helping me, whether Toshiba, ATI, or forums like these I'll just have to go back to Vista. God I can never win. Stick with XP: FN doesn't work, video card doesn't install properly, internet keeps dropping, and my tuner card I bought for 150 still doesn't work (probably due to video card not being installed properly) or with Vista: really, really slow compared to XP, tuner card still doesn't work, and crappy video quality. I was even thinking Linux, until I saw people were STILL having problems, to me this is Toshiba's flop, I have always deeply trusted them and believed that their products were great until now. The only way to get a new laptop would be to sell this one for $500 and get a new one. Something that has XP. Oh and for the record I do this stuff for a living, but my boss is smarter and he is even babbled on what to do, even though we sell computers, he would only give me 10% off.