Is sticking with XP Pro a no brainer?

Hi,
I ordered a T400 Elite last week and am waiting for delivery! Two weeks has never seemed so long. It comes with the XP Pro downgrade. I've had some experience with Vista and didn't think SP1 was horrible. I'm wondering whether to stick with XP or go to Vista. The T400 has plenty of power to handle Vista, although I didn't get the Intel Turbo feature, which I understand is somewhat controversial anyway. I've been reading many reviews about Vista and I'm leaning toward XP. I was wondering if this is wise. Vista certainly seems very stable. Indeed, most Vista crashes are nvidia driver related. Nvidia is notoriously bad. But the T400 is ATI. The thing I dislike most about Vista is its bloat, but I suppose you can hack it down. Thoughts?

 

Vista works great on the T400, unless you have a compatability problem with a specific program, I would stick with Vista. Also, people have been reporting less power consumption with Vista and if you have the ATi card, you can switch between intel and ati on the fly.

 

I Love Vista, as long as your computer can do it it's great. it does take some extra steps for simple things sometimes (to make newbs more comfortable) but it will be come second nature. It's a little bit brighter too, like it won't let you copy a 4GB file to a 4GB flash drive... because it's formatted and doesn't have the space, XP would just go go go oops! I need another 4 kb!

Vista's been good to me, never had any compatibility issues either

 

Yes, stick with XP. I don't use Windows much, but I got rid of Vista and replaced it with XP ASAP. Vista's just too slow.

 

I agree that vista is a bit 'smarter' with a few things (like isend2c mentioned), but these are relatively minor for most use, in my experience. However, I have had a lot more software freezes and whatnot on vista as compared to XP. I definitely would stick with XP if I had the choice.

 

Vista looks great I think, but XP is faster. A lot of the look can be mimiced with software like WindowsBlinds.

 

i vote xp pro.

 

Considering you got the XP downgrade option I would say downgrade to XP.

I HAD to downgrade my T61 that came with Vista because the machine had only 1GB of RAM and the HDD was doing all the work required for the swap file to work, and slow as HELL.

I like many functionalities native to Windows prior to the appearance of Vista, such as the 'simple' yet effective Search function.
Also having a clean install of XP on a new hardware just makes you enjoy the blazing in speed.

 

I have to disagree with folks here. I'm using 64 bit Vista. It performs better than XP - faster and hangs less. You need to turn of UAC, Superfetch and Indexing/Search, and it flies. (there are better 3rd party search tools out there.)

 

My T400 has Vista Business 64 on it. I also ordered the Xp Pro downgrade disks. I thought for sure I would dowangrade. I have only had my computer a few days, and have never used vista before. I am trying very hard to get used to it. I was no expert wtih XP, but I knew it pretty good. Vista seems slower in many regards (booting, shutting down, and just simply getting programs to start running on the screen). I have implemented the many tips and tweaks as recommended here in the NBR forums. The tweaks have definitely helped, but i am still not convinced it runs as fast as XP.

My wireless issues are still not completely resolved, and it seems my Xp computers are able to get a wireless signal and hold it better than this T400. When I completely figure out the wireless issues, I think Vista will work for me.

My advice is to do what I did. Try vista for a little bit. And if you dont like it you can always downgrade. It shouldnt be too hard to redo the system to XP with the disks....but switching over is time consuming.

 

Switchable graphics alone is more than enough of a reason to consider Vista. You should be able to get an extra 2 hours of battery life on the integrated graphics processor. The x4500HD is still plenty strong to do Vista Aero, 2D graphics, and even accelerate decoding of HD video. The discrete card is really only needed for gaming, 3D rendering, and similar apps. With Vista you can switch this on the fly. If you use XP you have to reboot and switch the graphics in the BIOS.

I have no performance issues with Vista Business on my x200 Tablet. My computer is much slower than your T400 (only 1.86 GHz vs. 2.53 GHz+ for you) but Vista still runs great. All of my programs run fine under Vista (and I am using the 64 bit version which adds an extra layer of compatibility problems because no 16 bit processes are supported). The only thing that doesn't work is a 5 year old HP laserjet on my home network (although oddly enough a 10 year old HP laserjet that I also have works just fine).

The biggest thing to do is get lots of RAM (2GB is the minimum you want, don't listen to Microsoft saying that 512MB or 1GB is plenty). I turned off UAC immediately because it is annoying and slows you down by dimming the screen and bringing up prompts.

Unlike mikec, I left Superfetch and inexing on because I find that they improve performance on the long run. Superfetch will cause your hard drive to thrash for about 5 minutes every time you reboot your computer while it fills your RAM with a prefetch cache. However, it makes many applications load really quickly because they are always stored in RAM (I tend to have long sessions and run several different programs so this works well for me). Indexing is also nice because it allows you to use the start menu as a search bar to quickly find programs and/or files. This is far faster than trying to navigate the XP start menu with a mouse, and the only thing that is faster is running most of your programs via a run command shortcut (e.g. Windows+R to bring up run dialog, type firefox, hit enter).

 

Discrete graphics has absolutely no benefit for 3D rendering unless you're running one of the very few cutting edge renderers that use GPGPU (e.g. CUDA) techniques. For every other renderer on the market, 3D rendering is entirely a function of the CPU.

 

xp pro = battery hog = performance

 

(1) Windows Sidebar = battery hog

Windows Vista SP1 - Sidebar = Great

Windows Vista SP1 = Great + Sidebar

sub in (1)
Windows Vista SP1 = Great + battery hog

crap..

either way, philosopherdog should try out Vista for at least a week and then decide.

 

How does WPF fit into this? I thought WPF apps made use of hardware rendering? I think there's even a tool that Microsoft supplies that analyzes your app and tells you when you are getting hardware rendering and when WPF falls back on software.

 

I read some people are saying XP is faster than Vista. Are there any benchmarks to confirm that?

I had a Sony Z and tried it with XP and Vista. Vista felt just as snappy to me as XP.

 

If there's one thing I've learned in the past while since Vista has come out and doing tech support on new computers, its that Vista has gotten a horrible reputation for many things that are in no way its fault. I see brand new, state of the art laptops (from all sorts of manufacturers) running like absolute crap with Vista because they pack the laptop so full of horrible software that it slows it to a crawl. And what happens? The user thinks its all Vista's fault when in reality a fresh install of Vista would be amazingly faster and more stable.

I'm not saying Lenovo is like this (they do install some crapware, but not nearly anywhere near as much as other companies), just that that is where it seems this bad reputation comes from. I have personally seen Vista running incredibly smooth as silk on a computer with a dual core 1.86ghz cpu and 1gb of RAM. Not to mention the report I remember reading where something like 47% of all blue screens on Vista were caused by nvidia display drivers- which just further shows more issues that are not Vista's fault, but that Vista gets the blame for.

There has been some problems, of course, but SP1 has fixed a lot and Vista is a LOT better these days. And I disagree with some of the other posters- don't turn anything off. Superfetch DOES help, especially if you get lots of RAM. Indexing is awesome, if you're familiar with OS X at all then you know how ingrained Spotlight is in the OS, and Vista is very similar- hit the Windows key, type in your search, and most of the time bam, right at the top is what you want. It's incredibly handy.

I also dislike all of this UAC hate. For years all I've heard is "Windows is so insecure!" Now Microsoft finally institutes changes to that and all I hear is "security is so annoying!" UAC is no different from Linux requiring sudo and a root password for any important stuff or OS X requiring a user to type in their admin password for important stuff. Again, it did used to be a bit overzealous at first, but SP1 fixed a lot of it, and programmers are finally starting to write their programs with UAC and security in mind, which just results in less prompts. It promotes an excellent security mind set and definitely should not be turned off.

So there's my little pro-Vista rant. It gets so much undeserved flack these days I just felt the need to say something.

 

I think UAC is a good idea for a lot of people. But with my usage pattern I just found it coming up way too often (it would even show up when I renamed files). It is a little different than the implementation in Linux/OSX, because Vista UAC dims the screen and wastes about 5 seconds each time. For many people (although not necessarily the members of this forum) UAC does make sense, but for me it was bothersome without providing any real protection.

I definitely agree Vista gets blame for things that are not it's fault. It runs very well on my low voltage x200 Tablet (1.86GHz C2D, 2GB DDR3). I could probably manage it with 1GB if I ditched the Thinkvantage software (although I like it and find it superior to the built in equivalents).

The only real problem I have had with Vista (and the thing that prevents me from switching to it on my desktop), is compatability with older hardware. On a new machine, with all factory components (like a ThinkPad) it works great, but on a custom built rig with some parts (e.g. Soundcard, RAID card, TV card) that are 5+ years old you get problems.

 

lean vista is better for me, has about 1.5-2 more hours of batt. life on 9-cell batt.

 

The ironic thing is that in PC hardware forums there are many threads with "XP is better" downgraders having problems after downgrading to XP!

I don't get it. Why take a working Vista system and downgrade it to XP when downgrading frequently breaks something?

My systems are running the OS they came with, and I'm happy with all of them (three Vista, one XP at the mo)!

P.S. I have not yet seen any evidence that Intel Turbo Memory does anything to improve Vista's performance, except in cases where you have very little RAM (512MB or less). Extra RAM is so cheap that it makes Intel Turbo Memory a complete waste of money.

 

Hey Folks,
I see that this is going to be a pretty tough decision. My girlfriend has an hp 6500 series dual core and Vista has been totally solid on it. It boots very quickly and has never crashed in almost a year, except when I fiddled with the nvdia drivers. I agree that there's a lot of trashing of Vista by people who have never really used it, but I suppose they got off to a rocky start with some pretty serious problems with pre-sp1. I think the main issue for me is that it's so resource hungry, although the hardware can handle it. I take it this is one of the things MS is planning to address in Windows 7. 64 bit sounds interesting; not being able to run unsigned programs would certainly put the hex on too much fiddling!

 

Use VLite to install a clean version. It doesn't use that much resources...

 

I have a T400 with Vista 32 bit...this was my first experience with Vista and I hated it. With a computer like this the interface should be snappy but it was NOT. I optimized every single thing I could find including turning off UAC, indexing, disabling services, clearing startup, etc....and it still just felt slow and awkward. I don't like how the windows are cluttered with useless buttons. It's just not ergonomic. In games, the performance was worse than XP. So, today I formatted and installed XP Pro SP3 and I'm happy again. I will wait for Windows 7 to see if Microsoft can actually release a quality product.

 

I prefer, use and support Vista and would not recommend downgrading.

Downgrading may or may not increase performance, while often being more work than time is saved in the long run, be it because of incompatible drivers, lack of features the user is expecting, or the need to tinker with defaults to such an extent that the system is not actually being used for a good long time.

And remember that XP received as many complaints from Windows 9x users as Vista is getting now

 

The fact that this discussion is even taking place is quite amazing. Here we are close to the release of the next Windows, and the argue still rages on whether downgrading Vista is better than XP.

Thanks redmond.

XP Pro will be faster, and it will use more battery. Vista will run well if all the drivers decide to work properly, the planets align and you hold your mouth just right.

 

In a world where hardware becomes almost obsolete at the time of ordering, I would not call at least a year off 'close to release'

Anyway, regarding this eternal X vs Y discussion, to each their own. No one can force you to choose an Operating system you do not want to run.

 

Really? The graphics switching between discrete and integrated only works for Vista? Is this stated somewhere or just from experiences of owners who have downgraded to XP?

 

With vista you can switch graphics very easily without a reboot. With Xp you have to do it in the BIOS.

 

First thing i did upon receiving our T400 was to install XP SP3...I didn't even give Vista a try...however, after reading other's positive experiences with Vista, along with a desire to compare battery life under both environments, I installed Vista Business x86 and it has become my OS of choice over XP...

I still run XP SP3 in a virtual environment now for nostalgic reasons, but I'm very satisfied with Vista's performance...I did follow the basic tweaks and turned off unnecessary services, but still kept disk indexing and system restore on...i wish i could observe what other's have considered slow performance in Vista after they had applied all known tweaks, because Vista is responsive and peppy in my opinion...it boots and shuts down 3-5 seconds slower than XP and it definitely is slower in games than XP, but on the flip side, Vista has been every bit as stable, feels quick and responsive, hasn't shown any compatibility problems with existing software, and provided almost an hour MORE battery life...

...i believed all the horror stories about Vista and they probably were all true pre-SP1...but ever since the day i actually tried Vista (SP1) for myself, I've been pleasantly surprised and would rather not go back to XP as the host OS (no offense towards XP)...

 

Vista is more resource intensive than XP. XP is able to run better with less hardware compared to Vista. Vista with 2GB ram is equivalent to XP with 512MB ram.

On top of that, Vista had slow file transfers and slow network file transfers. Vista also had many issues with poor driver support from manufacturers.

Vista is not too bad, but the improvements do not outweigh the resource requirements.

Vista = meh, it is so-so.

 

I was probably the most hardcore XP professional fan but when I started using Vista business 64 for my T400, I loved it. I still use XP on my desktop but dont be afaird to switch!