Purchasing & Installing Windows XP

Please bear with me if I sound too ignorant

I'd like to buy Windows XP so that all my future notebooks be installed with it instead of Vista. My current laptop has XP pre-installed. So here are two questions:

1. Of all the Windows XP CD's sold on the market, can they be installed on more than one computers? Is there a license issue?

2. Some of them say "with SP2", some "with SP3", etc... must be Service Pack, right? How do I know which to choose?

3. Once I have the XP CD, and suppose my new laptop comes with Vista, how to replace the Vista with the XP? Is it a complicated process? Any reference to sources welcome.

Many thanks in advance!

 

As far as I can tell:

1. You need a valid license key per Windows XP installation, the CD itself has nothing really to do with it. For Example: I could take one XP CD and use it to install Windows XP on other machines, as long as I bought additional licence keys for those machines.

2. Correct, SP3 is the latest service pack, and is a rollup of all the patches, etc. released since SP2 was released. If you can, to save time by not having to install SP3 later, get a cd containing SP3.

3. Many forum users have created guides to installing Windows XP on popular models, these can be found in each company's respective forum on NBR.

 

First, not all laptops have XP drivers, most modern laptops will NOT support xp

1. Depends on the license, but most is 1 computer at a time
1. Yes, thats service pack
3. Depends, some laptops will not even work with xp at all. And you will have to slipstreme drivers and what not...


personally, i find vista to be great, and so no reason for you to go to such steps to avoid it.

 

i have one oem xp cd that came with my notebook.. i've installed it no problem on my two desktops and my girlfriends computer. u can install it on any computer any number of times with the same product key

 

Thanks a lot, everyone! My current and probably future laptops are Thinkpads, so I'll look there to find any XP install instructions.

That sounds good. What should I look for when I buy one from the online sellers? Not all OEM can be installed unlimited times, or can they?

 

You can install OEM as many times as you want on the same computer without violating the EULA. However, you are using a seven year old OS, and shortly you are going to be very limited as to what hardware will work with it. I think you are being unrealistic with this plan. Try Win 7 and you will be happy with that.

 

1. Each installed copy of XP must have its own license - the media used is irrelevant, so you can, in fact, use one CD to install multiple times, but each separate installation must be separately licensed (if, that is, you want to do it the legal way - I'm sure other ways exist, but as those ways would, by definition, be illegal, and since I don't care to discuss thievery, I'll not say anything about them).

2. It doesn't really matter whether you get a CD with SP3 or just SP2 on it - the only distinction that might be valid would be a price difference. If you get a CD with only SP2, it's a very simple matter to have SP3 already downloaded and ready to go so that you can immediately install SP3 right after doing the installation of SP2 from the CD.

3. As others have adverted to, you may have quite a lot of trouble with this point. As others have pointed out, many of the newest systems do not provide XP-based drivers, so you may find yourself lacking some functionality if you try to install XP on a brand-new system.

More fundamentally, though, why throw away a perfectly good _Vista license you've already paid for? _Vista is, more or less, on a par with XP, although more and more you will begin to see XP falling behind as fewer and fewer new apps will continue to work with it - that means that you may be stuck using apps that are several years old; doable, depending on what you need them for, but certainly not pleasant if you want the latest and greatest (FWIW, you could, in fact, still run something like Win98 - I know someone who does - if all you needed were apps that ran on Win98).

 

I've seen tons of negative reviews of Vista. I don't care Vista provides a "prettier" look; it uses more storage & memory and seems to have various bugs etc.. So far, all the software CDs (not many) that I have are XP compatible. I'm not a high end user and definitely play no games . But I am open to any advice that I will some day, find Vista a necessity.

(Based on the complications the above replies indicate, maybe I'll be better off to have XP preinstalled?)

 

It's not 2007 any more , SP1 is completely solid.

 

News to me I'm going to search for some positive reviews

(Do the laptops we purchase-Thinkpads in mind--come with the Vista with SP1?)

P.S. 1. It still uses much more storage and memory, though?
P.S. 2. I remember long ago (well, 2007 ) there was a sticky post on these forums that shows lists of softwares that are compatible/incompatible with Vista. I can't find it. Anyone knows?

 

As I said (keep in mind, I've got nothing but XP on my machines and have no intention to change any of my existing machines over to _Vista), _Vista is, more or less, on a par with XP in terms of functionality and etc and so there is no point to throwing away a perfectly good _Vista license that you just paid for that comes pre-installed in order to spend more money to get a copy of XP to install in its place.

In short, if you don't already have _Vista on your computer, I don't see the point in moving up to _Vista; conversely, if you already have _Vista on your computer, I don't see the point of spending more money to step back to XP - that'd be a waste of money, quite frankly.

 

I still see quite a number of negative reviews on Amazon.com of Vista with SP1 as recently as last month. Just what good is it to have Vista for a low-end user? I don't need pretty looks, high security, fancy features, but I do need simplicity & ease of use and least bugs. I just need to get the ordinary jobs done in a no-frill way. Will not the new softwares be made mostly still compatible with XP?

 

Then just get _Vista Basic; no fancy frills or anything. As to the negative "reviews" you say you saw - did you ever get a chance to discuss those reviews with the authors? I'm guessing not, which means that you really don't have a sufficient context to really be comfortable that those reviews can be relied upon.

On the other hand, you can cross-examine all of us here when we state propositions about _Vista, so you should have a better context for determining if what we say here is reasonable, or full of holes.

 

Yeah Amazon reviews are a great source to base your purchasing decisions

http://www.amazon.com/review/R1PPJ3...g=UTF8&ASIN=B000PSWZSC&nodeID=#wasThisHelpful

You are better off dealing with tech oriented and knowledgeable people like you will find here. I, and many others will tell you to use Vista SP1, it's fine, stop buying into the BS.

 

Vista is and probabably was always meant to be a stepping stone from XP to Windows 7.

To see how it all hangs together.

MS now knows what direction it must follow. After Vista.

Just a thought....

Cheers,
Theo

 

So maybe I could just bypass the Vista and keep XP until Windows 7 comes out and switch to Win 7?

 

Although this is possible, it violates the EULA. That OEM copy is tied to the original machine and cannot be transferred to another.

 

Agreed, that's the same place where people trashed TurboTax 09's Amazon star ratings after Intuit changed it's pricing structure for filings. The same place where people trashed Spore over DRM-Perhaps rightly so but still, these things aren't really related to the actual quality/features of the product.

If you can, why don't you take a Vista system for a spin?

My machine is fairly run of the mill, and runs Vista fine, no lag what so ever.

 

I think that's a good idea, if you can get a hold of an install disc from a friend you can use the trial for a few days and see how it runs on your machine.

 

Systems that come with OEM versions pre-installed should be coming with SP1 now - that largely depends on whether or not MS had released SP1 to the OEMs before or after any particular unit was imaged.

P.P.S. 1. _Vista doesn't "use" more storage and memory in the sense of hogging a lot of extra RAM for itself - that's a myth based on folks looking only at their task manager and not taking the time to understand what's actually going on under the hood, in this case the differences between _Vista's superfetch and XP's prefetch functionality. Basically, _Vista is much more aggressive about filling up otherwise unused RAM with code and data that, based on its algorithms, you are most likely to be using in the near future. As a consequence, someone who only looks at the task manager will get the (mis)perception that _Vista is using a lot more RAM than it actually is, when in fact most of that "used" RAM is simply prepopulated with code/data that is likely to be used next, something which only makes the system work faster, not slower.

It is true that _Vista's own code/data have a larger RAM footprint, but not nearly as large as it's made out to be by folks who've confused pre-populated RAM with RAM used by the OS's own processes.

Put it this way, would you rather just have unused RAM sitting idle, rusting away, as it were?

P.P.S. 2. You probably cannot find that sticky any more because it was unstickied because it was no longer particularly relevant. Yes, when _Vista first came out, there were a significant number of compatibility issues - a problem that Microsoft was at least partly to blame for; however, in the years since _Vista's release, that situation more or less no longer exists. To put it in perspective, the first word processor that I used to use all the time - Wordstar - is not compatible with _Vista, either, nor, most likely, with XP. Things change, and once the new kid on the block settles down and starts acting respectably, things'll go smoothly, as they are beginning to do with _Vista. Finally, since Win7 is, essentially, the next iteration of _Vista (they share the same kernel), Win7 should go much more smoothly than _Vista did, and I would not expect anywheres near the number of issues as there were when _Vista was introduced.

 

It's not like we're still in the 2006, today it is soon to be 2009, vista along with all the drivers for all hardware gets improved by time.

It's always the same thing when a new OS is out and running that it's bad, runs slower than it's precursor, takes up more ram (which could be good as you don't want ram to be unused, i bought an upgrade for the RAM to get it used and not to let it be unused)and so on, always this argue, it takes years before everyone realises that it's only when the OS is at it's start that it can be buggy, but after a couple of years, comon, be logical

I'd give you the advice to stick with Vista, there's nothing to fear there. You can get it too look the same as XP. It'll be as good as XP is, if not better in some perspectives, XP is old and i would think that because of age, the hardware can't get stuck with old software/operatingsystems in order to get fully use of it.


And btw, usualy the bad reviews always seems to be from people who does not know how to properly set up an OS or how to understand why it does the way it does. People who unintentional installs bloatware and such..

 

I decided to log back into XP after using Vista for about 2 months and I have to say that XP is still running strong. For some reason, it still feels solid and smoother than Vista.. Also runs a lot faster. XP is more simplified and uses less resources. Just to do a weak comparison, XP is NOD32 and Vista is Norton 2006.

All I have to say is, who cares what people want to install on their system. It all does the same thing and takes you to the same place. Play games, browse the web, listen to music and word processing..

Does Vista perform the above tasks better? I doubt it. Maybe with games since Vista runs DirectX10... But on my desktop, I still can't get my surround sound 5.1 to work correctly on Vista.

 

gasshopper, i can agree that XP can feel alittle snappier, and that xp uses less resources, sure, well yeah, XP was made 7years ago.. so anything else would be plain strange.

But runs alot faster, what would be faster today if you're using a modern platform?
If you're using an old pentium3 system or something today i could agree that xp will run alot faster than vista, cause the hardware is so weak, but with todays hardware i'd say no, i've made every comparision possible for my own research between the OS'es and there's really no difference in performance to talk about.

You know why vista uses more resources? It's not like we're stuck with 1GB ram on todays systems or a slow CPU, specially not with a brand new system.

And yes, they both do the same So there's no need for him to buy an XP license anyhow, just stick with vista. Most people are afraid of the small changes in vista though, like some settings aren't located at the exact same place, but i don't blame them after using XP for 7years. It's all microsofts fault, taking so long between the releases.

What surround sound in vista? Like in what soundcard is there a problem with?

 

I have machines now running vista, xp and linux mint. Vista is by far the best. its 100 percent solid, on 3 of the machines I ahve running it. its even more solid now than xp. the problem people are having with vista is installing it on machines like p4's with 256mb ram. thats where the problem comes in. other than that its smooth sailing. just as xp was the evil stepchild of 98 and 2000 when it came out first because of being a "resource hog", the same thing happend with vista came out. it needed more, in order to do more.

I have been hearing vista this vista that, My vista installed machines, are great. They are the two I use all the time one, my notebook for work, the other my desktop photo editing rig. both are great, I just loaded linux on an old p4 notebook I have kicking around and thats pretty interesting to play with, but its not going to replace vista.

 

I don't why XP runs smoother. I'm running 2.4 quad core, 4gb rams, 9600gt with an ASUS on board sound chip using Logictech 5.1 subs.

You saying Vista uses more resources just because of changes in technology is true. But Win7 uses less resources than Vista...

I can't wait for win7 though. People hate vista for a reason. Hopefully win7 would be different.

 

A quad core system should definately run smoother on vista as xp isn't made for quad cores really.

To do much more efficent stuff it needs more from the system so yes, we're not stuck with 256MB or 1GB of ram today, so i don't see why you should complain about that. Do you?
I think it's logic that vista uses more as we're not stuck in the late 90's/early -00..


I have a question for you as you seem to know, or atleast it sounds like you know, why does win7 use less resources? What is the cause? There is always some kind of compromise.

Most people that hate vista doesn't know what they are doing wrong as they don't know how to use it, most people are incapable to handle a new operating system when there has been a operating system for many years that users has gotten used to. Ain't saying that you're one of them. But most of those who are not satisfied with it has done something wrong without themself knowing it.
Why i know this is because everyone that i know of, that has a great interrest of computers and wants to learn, all of them has had a successfull time with vista.