Which performs better on a netbook - Vista or XP?

I just bought an Acer Aspire One 751, 2GB RAM, 250GB HD and the Atom processor.

Performance is OK, but definitely not great. I ONLY use this netbook for Gmail, Google Docs, Chrome, MS Office.

Would a clean install of XP offer a significant performance increase over Vista Home Basic that it currently runs and are there any features in Vista that I'd really miss, perhaps battery/power management? I've worked with Vista before and don't notice major differences between XP & Vista, at least not for what I use my computers for.

Thank you!!!

 

If you want to put Vista on a netbook you need to upgrade to 2GB ram and run Vista Basic. But Windows 7 is another story, that runs very well.

Vista and W7 will increase the battery life.

 

I have 2 GB netbook and you'll need it to run Windows 7. However, it is a little slow sometimes but I think that's related to the CPU and not the amount of RAM.

EDIT: To answer your question, I would go with XP or Windows 7 and skip Vista altogether.

 

XP will perform better than Vista on that netbook. If I were you though I'd move to W7 on it rather than back to XP. I have a Samsung NC10 netbook (Atom proc, 2 GB RAM) that came with XP but I long ago went to Windows 7 RC. I didn't use XP on it very long but I think the W7 performance is pretty close to what I had with XP, though I only use it for "netbook" tasks.

But Vista on a netbook isn't really ideal. Did it ship with Vista or did you install that yourself?

 

Dell at one time sold their mini-12 with Vista and 1GB of ram, and from reviews I've read it didn't work very well. XP is probably best on a netbook but eventually they will be sold with W7 Basic so that might be OK too. I'm not sure if anybody really knows what is different in W7 vs. W7 beta versions that are out now and how that will affect how the OS runs on a netbook.

 

Vista Basic came pre-installed. I'm pretty sure I'm gonna migrate to XP here soon, then maybe 7 when it comes out; I'm on a friends' Toshiba netbook that has only 1GB RAM with XP Home and MAN, is this thing FAST compared to mine!! This thing is almost as fast as my 2.4ghz P4 Dell laptop I have as my main PC!!!!

More opinions are welcome, but I'm really leaning towards XP now.....

How much difference is there between my 1.3Ghz atom (I think it's a Z-series) and the N280 @1.6Ghz on this Toshiba? The processor alone wouldn't make such a huge difference in speed, would it? Isn't most of it because XP is so much lighter than Vista?

Thanks!

 

I think Vista will freeze up a lot with the OP specs. It's still a 50/50 chance on notebooks/desktops with 2GB Ram and dual core processors so I can only imagine how it would preform with a Netbook.

 

How about just get Vista with the free upgrade to W7 when it comes out?

 

Can't really say what differences you'd notice between the 1.3 and 1.6. I can tell you that my NC10 has the 1.6 N270 Atom processor, so my observations are regarding that. For XP I think 1 GB would be plenty, but for Windows 7 you'd want 2 GB, which you have.

I'm no XP fanboy (I never really need to see it again) but on a netbook I'd definitely go with XP over any version of Vista. I think you'll be much more pleased with the performance. But 7 is worth a try too. I just finished (as in less than a minute ago) installing the Windows 7 final version on my NC10. Too early to say how the final compares with the RC, but my initial impressions are that it's every bit as snappy. I'd definitely choose it over XP.

 

I'd rather go with Vista or Windows 7 than XP on my acer aspire one netbook. I have used XP on this netbook for about a month before I couldn't stand the interface and the general way of how xp worked. Then I installed Vista home premium on the netbook and it runs like a charm. Battery life went up and the inteface is very smooth. It feels a lot faster than XP. Then I upgraded to windows 7 ultimate, and the experience was much better than Vista and miles ahead of XP.

Btw... readyboost + eboostr3 on flash storage really accelerate the performance of these netbooks. Eg. photoshop starts in about 5-10 seconds. Internet explorer 8 starts immediately

 

vista should run just great on that netbook. it has 2gb ram, which is enough. it can do dx9, so aero is possible, and looks great and enhances usability.

i've seen similar systems with vista on, they perform great.

i would never use xp on such a machine. win7, maybe, xp, never. vista, sure.

 

I know that it SHOULD run well, but it doesn't. As I said in an earlier post above, I played on my friends' Toshiba NB205 for a while yesterday and it was BLAZING fast compared to mine. His Toshiba runs XP and only has 1GB RAM.

WHY do you prefer vista over XP so much and why do you say that I should not run XP on my machine?

 

I have Vista Ultimate on my Asus 1000h and is running well. I used to have XP on it but after all the programs I loaded it was very slow. I mostly use it to store images and videos while travelling. Have some music and movies on there also. I upgraded the memory to 2gb and the HDD to 500gb.

 

i have initially xp on eeepc 900 & mini 2140. i upgraded the 2140 to win7. i had to change the eepc 900 to linux mint
(both 1gb of ram)
i find XP not maintenance free and need to do a lot of tweaking every now and then compared to win7

so, i recommend upgrading from xp to win7 and just skip vista

 

I use XP on my Netbook with only 1GB...I would only entertain using Vista if I had a minimum of 2GB on my Mini 9.

XP works fine for me for what my uses are right now.

Cin...

 

I think it's the Z series processor that's the issue. The Mini 12 was saddled with it, Vista Home Basic (for a short time) and the GMA 500 graphics. Needless to say that it too was criticized for being slower than other netbooks using the N series Atom.

 

Does it really make that big a difference?

 

It shouldn't since all future Intel powered netbooks will use the GMA 500. I think it more had to do with the PATA 4200rpm hard drive.

 

Here is a comparison from the horse's mouth:
http://ark.intel.com/Compare.aspx?ids=41411,35466

As far as FSB and what else I understand, there really doesn't seem to be a huge, huge difference between the N280 in my friends' Toshiba and the Z520 in my Aspire 751.

We're not talking the difference between a P4 and Celeron.

So that leads me to believe that what is making the Toshiba so much faster is simply the fact that it runs XP and NOT Vista.

From what I can find online, both the Toshiba and my 751 have a 5400RPM hard drive, so we can rule that out too.

Sorry if I seem so anal about this, but I was really disappointed to find the Toshiba to be so much faster (big, big difference) and I'm really wanting to install XP on my netbook but can't as I'm out of town.

 

because it's a much better os to use, to support, to trust on, to rely on, etc. it's just 6 years of evolution.

on a technical note, xp fails to use 2gb ram properly, and pages to disk much too often, degrading the netbooks performance needlessly to the same performance as if you had 1gb ram.

oh, and vista is simpler to install, too.

what i would do, personally, is i'd get one of the cheapest ssd's around (i guess the kingston ssdnow V, and 2gb ram. the netbook would then run cicles around all other systems (except mines, as they're all ssd based), and that while being tiny and portable and all.

the os of choise is never dependent on the processor, or mainboard. performance of an os only depends on the ram, and the hdd. so don't care if it's a netbook, or a notebook, or a quadcore pc, or a 4x4core ultrahighendworkstation. the only thing that matters to determine the os is the ram amount, and to get the os fast, the disk.

that netbook has a good disk, and 2gb ram => vista.

(oh, and for vista/win7, it needs dx9. which that netbook has.. => vista, again).

if it doesn't run well, you're doing it wrong - deadmau5

 

What I meant was I think the Dell Mini 12 with Vista was slow was because some versions came with a 4200rpm hard drive, not the Z series processor.

 

No... just 6 years of passage of time - let's not get too carried away with a company's marketing. Other than interface and some security features you can reproduce on XP, Vista brought only scraps to the table considering the six years (and tons of bloat).

What are you talking about? Reduce the pagefile in XP if this is really an issue, then it won't 'page too often to disk'. When you say 'degrades performance' - you couldn't possibly mean 'relative to Vista'? That would be another one of your classic FUD comments. In case you did mean this, at best Vista now (mature) feels virtually as fast as XP on decent machines +/-5% (actually more '-' than '+' but anyhow).

Yes, taking 15 GIG ++ in the process compared to XP <2 GIG. And the 'simple' Vista online activation system that worked flawlessly for everybody

@Drjones - if you feel comfortable with keeping an eye on your own security - go for XP. You will get snappier system, that is much more controllable by the user and more backward compatible. If not, run with 7. Steer clear of Vista - most of the world (apart from daveperman) has written it off as a disaster and moved on.

@Daveperman - do you actually spend your entire life on this forum? I mean, I glance back after 6 months and sure enough you're still there!! >3000 posts?? Try googling 'a life'.

 

Thanks, I think I will do just that. What I think I want to do is dual-boot and really see how XP performs on this thing before completely ditching Vista.

I don't know if it actually did speed up after I installed SP2 or if I'm delusional...

Anyhow, can you point me to more info on setting up a dual boot? I saw the thread in the sticky at the top of this forum, but want more info.

Thanks again

 

Vista ran badly on Z-series Intel Atom processers, like the Vaio P and what I hear, the Mini 12. But this site also has a review on installing Windows Vista on an MSI Wind (around same specs as yours), and they said it was pretty good. Click

If I were you, stay with XP, or better go with 7, especially if you have Technet/MSDN and can get it.

If you have XP already installed and you have two partitions, install Vista on the second partition, it should automatically make a dual-boot (to my experience), but research if I were you.

 

If you'd actually know a few things about current computers, and been here to see some recent polls, you'd know most of NotebookReview likes Vista - because XP is outdated, less safe, harder to use. And not snappier.

It's not a disaster. Your ignorance on why people have perceived it as such is.

It is the world's most advanced consumer operating system. Show me another that analyzes its own boot logs and optimizes boot files for a quicker next boot. Or predicts which files you will use and preloads them into the RAM. Or has a large driver repository coming in through the software update system.

 

I have tested and used XP/Vista/Windows 7 on my intel atom netbook with 160GB hdd and 1GB of ram with readyboost and eboostr3 on SD card. So far, I can be very very very sure that Vista and WIndows 7 is much more snappier than windows XP not to mention Vista and windows 7 looks much better than XP.

 

1) Please note that in this thread we're talking about a NETbook, which obviously has a much less powerful processor than your average NOTEbook.

At my last job I had to purchase a new computer for myself, got a Dell Inspiron (forget the exact model) but it had a very large HD & 3GB RAM with Vista (again, I forget the exact version.)

I was very pleased with the system's performance. I can NOT say the same for Vista on my netbook with Atom processor.


2) Many, if not all of the features you mention are probably precisely why Vista runs so much slower on my Acer 751 NETbook, and why XP ran blazingly fast on my friends' Toshiba NETbook. Vista takes up far more system resources than XP and this is a fact - XP can run on as little as 256MB RAM (it won't be fun, but it will run) whereas Vista really shouldn't be run on less than 2GB, IMO.

Perfect example: My sister's computer has not been working for months. She lives very far away and once I visited her and was able to see it for myself, I removed as much crap as I could from starting up at boot, changed to Classic theme away from Aero, etc. and the system runs just about perfectly now. The system is a Dell Dimension Desktop with 1GB RAM and a 1.8Ghz CPU. Basically, there was so much stuff starting up with the system (both things she had installed and a ton of vista garbage) that it was choking the system and blue screening.


As far as showing you another, more advanced OS, well, hopefully we can look to Win7.

 

One more thing: I'm not trying to say nor imply that Vista is not a good OS, I'm just saying that it certainly does not always seem to be the best choice for a low-powered netbook.

 

DR try this site its got vista + xp and Vista + 7 plus every other combo inc ubutnu...

http://apcmag.com/the_definitive_dualbooting_guide_linux_vista_and_xp_stepbystep.htm

 

I have this same netbook but streaming video playback is poor. The picture skips. Any ideas? Thanks.

 

Vista is tricky to make it work under a low power system. It will work, but be prepared to disabled some things. Windows 7 doesn't require such thing as it's much better optimized, and more adapted for netbooks (has the ability to manage low amount of memory such as 1-2 GB).

Vista/Win7 will run fine, but that is assuming that you have a GPU that run Aero. Most graphic card can, but some don't.

If you have a 64-bit CPU, installing Vista/Win7 64-bit will greatly help in having a more snappier system.

 

This is so untrue! I downgraded from Winfows 7 to Windows XP and felt like I just bought a new netbook! and that is with all visual effects in Windows 7 and al unncessasry services disabled! I even disable System restore, themes service, windows defender, etc...

I will never touch anything other than XP on a netbook! forget about battery life, you won't even feel the difference since XP doesn't hammer your HDD with its useless super fetch services

 

Matrix your system is probably faster, because your system came with junk.
Ie: your XP was clean, so you don't have any crap, so it's fast.