Upgrading from Vista to XP

[Sirotnikov]

regarding the win2k compared to win-xp - I must say that even with XP's graphics turned off, win2k seems to be much more responsive than win XP.

some of our systems at work use win2k and some winXP. they run very similar processes.

I admit WinXP is a huge upgrade in many areas, but Win2K feels more stable and responsive.

Under win2k I rarely get the kinds of freezes and crashes of an entire system due to a heavy explorer process, that I get in win XP.

[Provost Harrison]

Actually I am curious whether there is a difference depending on how modern your PC is. Vista runs very well on my system, better than XP in fact, without any glitches. This PC is only a few months old, and had/has a fairly high spec (ie, this system is newer than Vista).

I suspect that if you have the technology in parallel with Vista you are fine, maybe even wise to upgrade, otherwise perhaps not...again, it depends on the system.

[TheStinger]

My Zx spectrum runs really slow on Vista

[Julian Delphiki]

Upgrade to XP, then

[Dry]

Originally posted by Provost Harrison
Actually I am curious whether there is a difference depending on how modern your PC is. Vista runs very well on my system, better than XP in fact, without any glitches. This PC is only a few months old, and had/has a fairly high spec (ie, this system is newer than Vista).

In our small company we bought a brand new HP-Pavilion machine, only available with Vista (according to the manufacturer), and specially designed for Vista.
This machine was sold to us as a monster of performance.

Things weren't that brilliant.

Not only were the performances less than average (took quite a time to just load simple documents), but a lot of services just didn't run. M$ files weren't even recognized by M$ applications; PDF files were seen as potentially containing viruses and needed confirm to open, and opening a pdf by clicking on its link in a browser made the whole thing just stall.
And I don't speak about the 2-3 crashes we experienced in less than a month.

One of the functionality forseen for this machine was to offer the VPN services for a co-worker currently in Spain, we never were able to have it run. (seems confirmed other sysadmins from other company)

To benchmark it a little more, we decided to try a game.
The game was EU3. While it took less than a minute to load on 'old' XP machines, it took close to 10 minutes (yes, that is: 600 secs) to load in SP mode. And playing was PitA, because of the slow perfs.
We tried it also in MP mode over the internet (as client, a remote machine was server), it took less than 5 minutes for XP machines to show up, we waited something like 20 minutes for the Vista machine. Playing was the same sh*t as in SP mode.

Despite the sayings of the manufacturer that no XP drivers were available for this Pavilion configuration, we downgraded to XP, found all necessary XP drivers and today that brand new machine, who was said to be specifically designed to run Vista is finally what it was meant to be: a performant VPN/development machine.

As advised by our experienced sysadmin, we now do as we did for XP, NT, Windows95,.. in their early days: don't upgrade, but wait for the SP2.
It seems true that Vista has potential, but it is not ripe yet. And as usual with M$ you get tons of graphical additions that you f***** don't need.

Judging from the reactions around us (both other developpers and customers), it seems nevertheless that a few of them are happy with Vista. So, our conclusion is that it may be dependent on the architecture, the HW of the machine.

On our side, we have decided, as long as it is possible, to downgrade all our PCs to XP, until Vista is truely ripe.
The PitA - as always with M$ - is that no new PC is sold with XP anymore. We are bound with this half-baked 1st version.