Prince

A couple of months ago I bought my first laptop, an Acer Aspire 5570z. I love it.

But I no longer have the same sentiment for the Vista Home Premium it occupies. I mean, yes, it looks really good. I like a lot of the new features.

But it has gotten so slow. It takes 8-9 seconds from when I click on an icon for it to launch Excel, or PowerPoint, for example, when no other applications are running.

A fresh install is very fast, but after a few weeks of use and installing the apps I like to use, it's considerably slower than my P4 1.6GHz desktop. This dual core machine should outperform the Dell easily.

Of course, XP bogs down too, in time, but it takes a considerably longer to happen. And usually with XP, I can do at least something to optimize the performance. I haven't found anything really that I could do on Vista that would help. I tried running defrag but it said no defrag needed.

Now, the problem is that Acer doesn't support XP on these notebooks and I've heard it is hard to locate all the drivers. I am wondering if any of you have any experience with something like this...if any of you have bought a recent laptop and replaced the OS with XP, and whether it worked, and whether it was worth it.

Because seriously, my desktop is pretty old and yet XP runs on it really fast. I'd assume it would perform at least as well on this notebook, and perhaps be able to make the most of its resources...

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LoganSnake

From what I've heard, if your hard drive is SATA, you will not be able to install XP on it. You can, but there is some incompatibility with the drivers and they are pretty hard to find.

Don't quote me on that, however.

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drego

For the most part (aside from LoganSnake and his SATA concern), there should be no problem rolling back to XP.

Just for shits and giggles, how much ram is in your laptop? What is the speed of your processor(s)? When the OS starts bogging down, how many processes are running?

~Drego

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xepherys

I run XPsp2 at home with SATA drives and have never had a problem (or even heard of such a concern). *shrug*

However, I'd be curious for your answers to drego's questions. Since the proc is 64-bit, I'm wondering if you are using Vista x64? I'm running Vista64 on my Core 2 Duo system here and it works GREAT. I've reinstalled Vista once due to slow down issues, but it's nothing that I don't see in XP all the time as well. I install and uninstall stupid crap constantly (I consider it part of being a geek :-p)

Too little RAM is a HUGE concern for Vista, though. Also, many start-up processes will bog you down quickly, even moreso than previous Windows versions.

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Martian

The problem isn't XP and SATA in and of itself, but more that he's installing XP on an OEM laptop. Drivers may or may not be a bitch to find and install for this purpose; I've never had a problem working with Acer hardware before, but I have heard some horror stories.

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xepherys

Hmmm, I can see this as a potential issue, however...

Nearly all OEM hardware components are the same as or identical to retail products. Even for a laptop, I generally use manufacturers drivers and not branded (laptop manufacturer) drivers, as they are often FAR out of date. Toshiba, HP and IBM seem to have a "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" view of updating tested drivers for their laptops.

Honestly, though, I'd give another stab at Vista. I'm not one for jumping into an OS before sp1 comes about (see my views in the thread right around this one regarding the Nehalem intel proc), but after the beta and all those ills, I finally opted for Ultimate and have been QUITE impressed.

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Halx

I ran Ubuntu on my brand new Vista laptop the other day. Am considering making the switch.

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Redjake

I have did this in the past 6 months on my new Gateway laptop -

Came with Vista preloaded, and it took 7 minutes and 30 seconds to turn on the first time, literally

From then on, it took a solid 3 minutes to fully boot into Vista

Luckily, the laptop came with a utility that allowed you to burn a Restore disc that contained ONLY Vista with none of the preloaded software and advertisements - I immediately created the Restore disc, formatted, reinstalled Vista, and the computer was approximately 300% faster

Then I started to notice that the laptop should simply be faster than it was, still

So I started looking around, and ZERO XP drivers existed for my laptop

At that point, I spent 8 hours tracking down every single hardware component to my laptop and finding stand-alone drivers for every component that went to DIFFERENT models of Gateway laptops, but similar in make

10 hours of web searching and trial and error later, I found a driver for every single component in my laptop - they were just for a slightly different model

Formatted the motherfucker, installed Windows XP, the laptop turns on and is completely in Windows in 25 seconds flat, and every. last. one. of the drivers worked. The 5-in-1 card reader works, the modem, the LAN, the sound, the video acceleration, the DVD-RW, the USB, ALL of it works - and none of the drivers are even made for my laptop

I basically found the model name of each hardware component, searched for it, found a similar Gateway laptop with XP on it that featured the same hardware component, and used those drivers - and it worked.

I couldn't pass it up (keep in mind this was 7-8 months ago):
1 GB of RAM
DVD-RW
5-in-1 card reader
5 USB ports
1.8 GHz Athlon 64
Lexmark Printer/Scanner/Copier

$450, no rebates

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damazon

Very same thing is happening on the a Vaio laptop i just brought 5 weeks ago. Running smooth first 2 weeks and now it takes 10 seconds just to open a blank excel worksheet. Kinda reluctant to roll back to xp since the site says some of the hot keys and functions may no longer function correctly.

Jinn

I just formatted my desktop running Vista and installed Red Hat. No complaints yet.

Likewise with my laptop, I pulled Vista off and replaced it with XP. It was a Dell, so drivers were much easier to find.

I still don't recommend Vista to anyone who does more than web browse, upload pictures from their camera and write things in Word. Anything more "technical" than that takes twice as long as it did on XP.

Hell - even joining a domain in Vista took me almost 5 minutes everytime I did it.

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Vitter

(sry, quoted you!)

You hit the nail on the head. What you will need to do is slipstream sp2 onto your xp disc(if it isn't already in your disc), then install it. Again, only if your HDD is SATA. There is also some storage cap(120GB) for xp when you don't have any SP on it, but thats another issue altogether, as not many laptop users are affected by it(IE don't have a larger HDD than an 80GB).

Alternatively if your HDD is SATA, there(usually) is a setting in the bios that can let you use your sata drives as if they were IDE, thus making slipstreaming sp2 into your XP copy a non-issue.

To slipstream a service pack onto your disc you will need to download the SP2 "for IT professionals" from the Microsoft website, then use a nifty program called 'nlite'(google it, its free), run it, and it will guide you through the steps.

*huff* *puff* *wheeze*

And thats only on the SATA issue. Moving on...

Vista is about 17% slower on most benchmarks than XP. The trade-off is Vista is (supposedly) more stable. When you say you computer is getting slower as you install the usual programs the most likely cause is all this bloatware included when installing components that are not necessary (but for your "benefit" as described by most vendors). You can generally disable them by right-clicking on the icons in the system tray and telling them to not start at boot-up. Other options include deleting entries in your start menu under 'startup' [start>all programs>startup], as most of the programs that put themselves in there help you to boot-up a particular application in the event that you use them(IE kodak easyshare). Another way to diable programs from boot-up is the ever-popular start>run>'type msconfig' to disable some peskier programs, but I try not to use it whenever possible.

Other causes for your computer becoming slow would be virus/spyware, but i'm not going to delve into those as I'm sure there is a seperate topic concerning that.

biznatch

You should try a Linux distribution, and use WINE to run any windows-only applications (even some video games work).
I've been considering doing this on my laptop.

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Prince

I replaced Vista with XP. Finding drivers from Acer's site was a bitch, but luckily some Google work got me the links I needed. I used a custom XP cd to install. I'd say pretty much all the usual components needed drivers, XP couldn't recognize much at all. And yes, the laptop-specific hot keys don't work without the bloatware, but I didn't use them anyway. I opted not to install any of that Acer stuff. I did not delete Acer's recovery partition though, in case I ever want to reinstall Vista from that partition for whatever reason.

It is fast. Vista took more than 30 seconds to shutdown, XP takes 5. Vista took minutes to boot to desktop with everything loaded... XP is ready for use under 20 seconds from pressing the power button. I've crammed all the usual software into it, tens of gigs of apps, and it shows no sign of slowing down.

I could not be happier. I do miss some of Vista's features, but this is just so much better. What's the point of buying a fast dual-processor computer and have it perform slower than the P4 desktop?

Thanks for your help guys.

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GonadWarrior

On a related issue, I have a new laptop, and I'm just getting ready to put all of my programs on it. I really don't want to waste my time if I'm going to roll it back to XP anyway. Which might be the case, since a couple of my older programs don't seen to work right on it.

Is there a consensus on whether I should do that? Is it possible that when the next service pack comes out, things will work better? Should I maybe create an XP partition?

Compaq dual-core with 1 gig memory and 80-gig hard drive.

Prince

My experience so far with my Acer dual-core with 1 gig of RAM is that Vista is fast enough in the beginning, but bogs down faster than XP ever did.

I ended up going ahead and replacing Vista with XP, and have not regretted that decision. I've slapped on all the usual software, about 50 gigs worth of it, and it's still a powerhouse.

I'll try Vista again in the future once the kinks are taken care of, but for the time being, I am enjoying XP's fast loading time of <10 s, as opposed to Vista's 2 minute mark.

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GonadWarrior

I've now completely given up on Vista. Too many expensive apps don't install, and I'm not going to fool with compatibility mode if it's going to run slow and not work with my printers.

Here's another little article regarding how playing music makes Vista take a dump.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=709

Lucifer

I'm starting to gather XP drivers for my Vista laptop and I'm wondering about the BIOS. Do I need to update (downdate?) the BIOS for an XP OS?

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Hanxter

remember this one word... Millenium

and vista's macrohard's replacement for something "better"

enuff said

shakran

I have SATA drives on 3 of my machines, and they're all running XP.

LoganSnake

So do I. However, I was describing q situation where his SATA drive comes with Vista pre-installed.

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shakran

Format a drive and it has no idea that it ever had Vista on it. . .I don't see why it would make a difference if vista was preinstalled or not.

host

MS isn't going to support XP any further. All of the machines descriptions I've read posted here are sporting 1 gig of ram.

I've been using a laptop for 8 months with 2 gigs of ram, Vista 32 bit home premium, 2.00 GHZ core duo, with no slowdown experienced.

Have you gone to control panel, clicked system and run the "Windows Experience Rating" utility? It should reveal how well your system is configured to run Vista.

I don't miss losing what I was in the process of doing when XP locked up, and I don't want to spend many hours configuring an obsolete OS on my machine.

MS sucks and Vista sucks, but they are what there is today. It's 2008, and MS will come out with a Vista service pack to fix some of the few bugs I have encountered.

Don't use any of the included virus software, I use Lavasoft Adaware and Spybot manual system scans. Use firefox instead of I.E.

Unless you move to Linux or Ubuntu, do you plan to still be running XP, 18 months from now? Buy some more ram, and run the "Experience Rating" utility.
My sub scores are processor= 4.9, ram= 4.8 and hard drive= 4.6

Rekna

I haven't had any problems with my laptop my experience score is:

Processor Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7500 @ 2.20GHz 5.1
Memory (RAM) 2.00 GB 4.8
Graphics NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS 4.1
Gaming graphics 895 MB Total available graphics memory 4.6
Primary hard disk 64GB Free (136GB Total) 5.3

Shauk

my experience score is BALLS

2.6

I'm not sure why it's so low either.

it's a GeForce 7150M/Nforce 630M

nvm, I researched my own answer.

7150M is shared memory archetecture video crap

your GeForce 8400M is standalone. Hence, it kicks the crap out of it.

damn.

maybe i should sell this laptop and upgrade (I JUST BOUGHT IT LOL)

healer

I "need" to install Vista (specifically 32-bit Enterprise) on my laptop soon. I say "need" only because I now support a few high-end users running Vista and I need to know wtf I'm talking about.

I don't know, however, how it will run on my laptop. I have a HP NC6320 with 2GB RAM. I just don't want to end up with a 2.6 like Shauk.

Anyone have a work instruction/checklist to streamline Vista? I don't need all the bells and whistles and flashing lights - I just want it to work, and fast.

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