Goodbye Vista... Hello XP Pro!

A while back I posted a thread called " is sticking with XP a no-brainer". Most posters said that they were loving Vista; I got encouraged. I made my plan to install x64 on my new T400. I got a T400 Elite loaded.

Anyhow, I have to say, I gave Vista a serious try. It was very stable. It looks great. I love all of the visuals, and there are a 1000 little improvements. I love the new start/search bar feature, for instance. Love the new explorer. Preview pane, search in every window, and so on. It's all great. It even ran fast on the T400. It was snappy for sure.

But there was one thing that drove me nuts. Some people call it the "Vista Heartbeat". Basically, Vista is a system built around paranoia. The machine is set, if you look in scheduler, to create a restore point on every start! You can shut this off of course. But then there's shadow copy of all deleted files and drivers, there's superfetch, and now Windows Search 4.0 is built into Vista SP1, and that thing's a notorious hog with its relentless indexing behaviour. Anyhow, I shut all of these things down and vigilantly tracked down stuff that was accessing my HD every 10 seconds no matter how long the machine was in idle. It was driving me nuts. And there seems to be no cure. There's tons of discussion of this problem out there. All of the tweaking was in vain. It was still churning and grinding away, even though I had 4 gbs of ram, left it overnight several times, tweaked everything! MS must fix this and fix it soon.

Anyhow, yesterday I popped in the XP PRO restore disks which comes with Vista Business. It took 3 hours for the machine to run through the whole install, but it was flawless. Thanx Lenovo for giving us the choice. Anyhow, I've never been so happy to see the XP screen come up and hear that homely sound that it makes when it boots (apparently it took Steve Ball 18 months to develop Vista's 4 second start sound). Before this experience I had Vista envy. You see this out there on the web a lot these days. How to make XP do this feature of Vista. I was guilty of it. I changed my whole sound scheme to the Vista one. Well I learned my lesson. XP Pro: I'm back, and I'm not going away anymore! The T400 totally smokes out with XP Pro. I'm so much happier with the new machine. Everything works, all my old programs run.

The Vista Heartbeat reminds me of the Tom Waits song "What's he building?". Let me end by posting the lyrics

Tom Waits
Mule Variations (1999)
What's He Building?

What's he building in there?
What the hell is he building
In there?
He has subscriptions to those
Magazines... He never
Waves when he goes by
He's hiding something from
The rest of us... He's all
To himself... I think I know
Why... He took down the
Tire swing from the Peppertree
He has no children of his
Own you see... He has no dog
And he has no friends and
His lawn is dying... and
What about all those packages
He sends. What's he building in there?
With that hook light
On the stairs. What's he building
In there... I'll tell you one thing
He's not building a playhouse for
The children what's he building
In there?

Now what's that sound from under the door?
He's pounding nails into a
Hardwood floor... and I
Swear to god I heard someone
Moaning low... and I keep
Seeing the blue light of a
T.V. show...
He has a router
And a table saw... and you
Won't believe what Mr. Sticha saw
There's poison underneath the sink
Of course... But there's also
Enough formaldehyde to choke
A horse... What's he building
In there. What the hell is he
Building in there? I heard he
Has an ex-wife in some place
Called Mayors Income, Tennessee
And he used to have a
consulting business in Indonesia...
but what is he building in there?
What the hell is building in there?

He has no friends
But he gets a lot of mail
I'll bet he spent a little
Time in jail...
I heard he was up on the
Roof last night
Signaling with a flashlight
And what's that tune he's
Always whistling...
What's he building in there?
What's he building in there?

We have a right to know...

More from artist :
Tom Waits

More from album :
Mule Variations

 

So what was driving you nuts again? Your hard drive being constantly accessed? Lol.

 

Sounds like you spent more time watching your hard-drive than you did actually using your computer =]

 

Lots of the things you say you don't like about Vista are to make searching, booting, opening programs, the whole experience faster. Vista is actually excellent if you have the hardware to compliment it, and will utilize that hardware far better than XP ever could, especially memory.

Enjoy your 6 (going on 7) year old operating system.

 

I recently uninstalled Vista from my T60. I installed XP Pro which is what shipped with my system. My machine runs faster, goes in and out of standby now almost instantaneous. Like McDonald's says "I'm Loving It".

I've been using Vista since it's been released. It's got some good and bad things about it. Unfortunately the bad out weighs the good so it's back to XP Pro for me.

 

Yeah, hell, let's install Windows 2000 or even maybe NT 4.0, that will fly on this hardware!

 

I prefer command line Operating systems, they only use my hardware when I tell them to =D

 

Yeah, think of all the hard drive space you could save if you just booted from a command line floppy instead of installing your OS!

 

while i think XP pro is incredible,the only one feature that i love (CANNOT live without) on my T400 is switchable graphics in the OS.

 

That is a very cool feature indeed.

 

Well my machine is plenty powerful for Vista to run on it; as I said in my post. My complaint about Vista, and this is a very common complaint by many users, is that it constantly nibbles away at your HD. Look at your HD light. It will never be still for more than 15 seconds. Why, if Vista is so brilliant at utilizing more ram, does it only use about 2 gb of my 4, and then constantly read and write to the drive when it's not even doing anything? Just sitting there. Even if you shut off Superfetch, indexing, etc. and do all the tweaks it will still do it. Notice, I never said that Vista wasn't fast on my box, but XP feels quite a bit faster and it doesn't constantly read and write to the HD. You don't need 4 gbs of RAM to run it, so it's simply immaterial that Vista can handle larger ram allotments on the x64 iteration. Vista doesn't seem to really take advantage of the extra memory from what I can see, unless you're running some really big hog like Photoshop. I think Vista has potential. But there's simply no excuse for the thing to be chewing at my HD incessantly. It's simply madness. What are they doing? Imagine if OSX did that. There'd be class action suits all over the place. Vista, simply put, is not quite ready for prime time. That's why many many people are waiting it out and hoping that MS can get it together for Win7. Time will tell. I gave it a chance. I'm not stuck on XP. But so far MS has got their work cut out for them. I personally don't need the nuisance.

 

I agree. But for now I'll wait the 12 months to see if Win7 solves some of the stuff that's preventing most serious users from switching.

 

You're a total clown.

I don't think the great bulk of XP users who are waiting for MS to come out with something better than Vista are advocating going to 2000; I'm not. XP is quite a bit better. Most serious computer users are rejecting Vista for many more reasons than I offered. Vista, all things considered, is not an improvement in my view and in the view of many many others. I think it's best to UPGRADE when you're doing to the next iteration of a program, rather than end up in a worse situation just for the sake of upgrading. That's foolish. I think there's a reason that MS is working to get Win7 out asap. Because Vista has been a disaster, and now I now, first hand, why. Although my assessment would be more generous than most.

 

For what it's worth, my company and every other very large financial services firms and insurance companies with whom we do business prohibit the use of Vista on company machines.

 

The reason Vista uses so much memory is because it monitors your application usage, then loads stuff you use often on boot, so when you need to use it, it will be there and load up near instantaneously. What's the point of having memory if you're not going to use it..?

All of the bad wrap on Vista has come from ignorant/uninformed users and from OEMs pushing out Vista on systems that can't handle it or with bad drivers. Vista had some issues pre SP1, but now it's a great OS. I don't think you should put Vista on a system unless the hardware compliments it, but I think putting XP on a machine that will fly through Vista is equally foolish. I'm glad you see how insane the idea is of putting Windows 2000 or NT 4 on hardware like this is... but really, the CORE COMPONENTS are the same straight through NT 4 up until Vista. So why not just run NT 4 (okay, that's a bit much, how about W2K?), it really will run faster than XP. We can agree that this would be silly, why can't we agree on this for XP?

A primary reason for this is because of incompatibilities in versions of Vista besides Vista Business/Ultimate with domains.

 

welcome back

now put a SSD and see the laptops speed explosion

 

Thanx! The SSD's are looking mighty tempting.

 

Well I agree that Vista has gotten a bad wrap and some it unjustified. But I've gone forth man. I've seen it with my own eyes on an amazing state of the art computer. It won't leave my HD alone. It's not just me. It's everyone's HD. Check it out in your Performance tab or watch the light. My Hardware is state of the art. That's not the issue. The issue is a Vista matter. It won't stop accessing my bloody HD no matter the tweaks, no matter the power. You could put 128 gb of ram on a box with a zillion processors. It's still going to grind your HD. It's designed to do that and I don't want it to. I think I'm being more than reasonable unlike many people who have trashed Vista. I'm a fan. I'm on the inside. I'm one with the Vista users. But it doesn't cut it. Simple.

Now your slippery slope argument that if we give up on Vista because it's poorly designed then by the same logic we should go back to W3.11 or whatever is a very bad argument. Vista is not to XP as XP is to NT or 2000. They all share the NT kernel. So what though. XP is the best of the lot. That's why I downgraded. Your defense of your choice of Vista is very thin my friend. Can't you come up with something better than a fallacious argument? I mean you could say it looks better, has better sounds, has a better explorer interface or something.

 

For Vista, it use to flicker the HDD light, but it turned out that it wasn't accessing the hard drive after all.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=300595&page=4

As this topic points out, the fix is simple:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/155217

I did this a few months ago and my HDD light doesn't flicker at all anymore.

BTW, stop looking at your task manager. Just do stuff on the computer and compare the true performance. Do not disable any features and you'll notice vista is extremely fast.

Yeah, it takes up some HDD space, but until you start running out of HDD space, you ought not complain about it. Personally, I use my laptop for taking notes and writing software for my classes... so I haven't found my tiny 80GB hard drive stressed at all.

Yeah, it takes up RAM, but you shouldn't complain about RAM until you run out and everything screeches to a halt. Trust me, you'll absolutely know when your ram has been truly maxed out. If you ever took the time to notice, SuperFetch has significantly decreased the start up time many programs. The stuff you do often will work much faster from this. I was in the anti-superfetch crowd until I took the time to notice what all it did for me. Turning it off before you even realize how much of a boost it offered was a mistake on your part. My machine has 2GB of RAM, yet superfetch hasn't given me any problems. Everything is quick and snappy.


Now, that said, there are a few things Vista does that annoys the crap out of me. For instance, the new explorer is very keyboard-use-unfriendly. Press F2 to rename a file, and it'll select it without the extension. Great for 99% of the time. But if you need to select the whole name, including extension... ctrl+a doesn't work. Ugh. Also, it always seems like the files never have focus whenever I want to move the selection around with the keyboard arrows.

 

Hi. Thanx for posting. I've actually got an in tact Vista install on a HD still, so I'll give this hack a try. The activity was, according to Vista's Performance feature, showing the activity as disk reads and writes. It wasn't just the drive light flickering. You could hear that it was writing to the drive and you could see which folders were involved. But I appreciate the suggesting. I'll give it a go and let you know if it works. Cheers.

 

I just tested this out on my girlfriend's Vista box and this hack doesn't work. Go into reliability and performance, look at your disk grinding away there. You can see what files it's reading and writing. That's disk activity in Vista. It's nonstop no matter how much ram you have or how fast your machine is. If anyone has a hack that will fix this post away. I've read a lot of posts on this and tried a lot of hacks and none have worked. Some people claim they get relief if they disable superfetch and indexing, but I haven't seen it.

 

funny. I have had no issues with windows after I upgraded all 3 of my machines to Vista.

 

I think if I read another "Indexing is slowing my system down" post I'm going to scream!

Windows Search 4.0 has numerous performance improvements compared to the older version. Indexing only occurs (by default, unless you change it) on the user directories. Once an item is indexed, that's it, it's indexed. It doesn't re-index the same item over and over again. Unless you are frequently adding, deleting, and moving large quantities of files, you will not see performance degradation from the service.

 

If only indexing were the only issue. Did you even bother reading the post?

 

People should just use the OS they want and just be happy. I've used both but still prefer XP Pro. Hopefully W7 will change that.

 

Unless you're buying an Intel SSD, don't bother. All the other non-server grade SSDs on the market are actually slower than HDs in real world use.

 

Those are all bad reasons to use an OS. I use Vista, as I previously stated, because it takes full advantage of my hardware in ways XP cannot even being to do.

 

you, my friend, are a very, very patient person...

Yes, I've got the same "problem" and it is not indexing, nor is it superfetch.

Like you already wrote in your original post, letting Vista sit overnight does not cure this, either.

So heartbeat is the word.

Resource Monitor lists all HDD r/w activity.

 

I am not a tech savvy person. I don't know what Vista does in the background, nor I know about its security-enhanced features, etc.

All I know is that my current laptop (Centrino 2 Duo, 2gb Ram, Nvidia 8400 GM) boots and runs faster on XP than Vista, and that's all I care for.

 

Vista has a much higher overhead cost than XP. Windows 7 is supposed to reduce this overhead cost of Vista and add minor features.

Vista is kind of wasteful with the resources it uses in terms of CPU, memory, and drive I/O. I get what MS was trying to do with the hardware, but it was done too aggressively and inefficiently.

 

That's what Microsoft claims, but technical analyses and benchmarking of Windows 7 pre-betas indicate that it uses the same core as Vista and is just as slow.[1]

Much of Vista's sluggishness vs. XP can be attributed to architectural changes intended to make Vista 'secure' enough to play Blueray disks. These 'features' have not been removed in Windows 7 and probably never will be removed from any future version of Windows.[2]


[1]
http://www.infoworld.com/archives/e...his&A=/article/08/11/10/46TC-windows-7_1.html

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/blogs/2008/11/12/follow-up-benchmarking-windows-7/

http://weblog.infoworld.com/enterprisedesktop/archives/2008/11/windows_7_perce.html


[2]
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html#cpu

 

All you care about is how fast it boots? You don't care if it's grinding your hard drive night and day while it's just sitting there? Well, I guess then you should leave Vista on your box then because that's what it's doing. No operating system needs to do that. It's bad engineering. If they don't cure this by Win7 I'll be moving to Linux or OSX myself. This isn't acceptable. Period.

 

Did you even bother understanding my post?

The point is, indexing is not a cause of slow down on Vista machines, as the common opinion believes.

On both of my vista systems, I have indexing enabled, and superfetch disabled. I also use AVG without any automatic scheduled scans. I do not suffer from the constant hard drive activity that everyone is clamoring about on either of my systems.

For those looking at the disk activity, what programs are accessing the disk? What antivirus software are you using? Did you disable the disk defragmenter service? Are most of you basing this off of the factory install or a clean install?

 

This. After this topic I went to see what was accessing my disk, and it was my AV, NOT Vista itself.