Windows

Downgrading From Vista Back To Windows XP

Posted by on Feb 23, 2009 | 12 Comments

Gnomie Brian “from Toronto, now in the UK” writes:

I just read your article on your downgrade from Windows Vista back to Windows XP.

I have a basic system AMD 64 Dual Core X2 4800 with 3.5 gigs of RAM with NVIDIA 8600 GT 1 gig video card and 320 gig Western Digital SATA drive. I was using Vista Business with SP1 for close to a year without issues – it ran smoothly, but I just felt there was something missing. The first thing I noticed was my Vista score kept going down on each update of the NVIDIA video drivers, I started out with a Vista Score of 5 and when the last update came out in January, I was down to 4.6. With other things, like my Web cam Logitech STX, the video was not clear; it was okay, but not quite right.

I do realise that this was not a quad core machine, but it had decent enough features and I just felt Vista was a tad sluggish running on what I felt should have been sufficient computing power.

So I pulled out the Windows XP Pro disc and decided to see how this tried-and-true system did on the same machine.

After completing all the updates right up to SP 3, the difference was outstanding. Overall memory usage was down to a whopping 30 % and sometimes more. Just the overall feel of the PC was better — it was like I gave it a breath of fresh air. My Web cam video quality was better and even my Epson DX 4800 seemed to work better.

Do not get me wrong. I do like Vista; it has some great features: networking mapping topology, the drive search, and, yes, the lovely eye candy of Aero. But there are negatives and as a support engineer dealing with businesses and their employees I can appreciate more than ever why companies are sticking with Windows XP.

I do wait in anticipation of Windows 7 and it confirms to me what many other professional IT folks have being saying about Vista being a long beta testing program.

  • Douglas Hornick

    Yes, but unfortunately Vista is a beta that many people paid big money for.

  • Wayne

    After using Vista for a year or so I installed XP dual boot and noticed the difference right away. The first thing I noticed was that my wireless network went from Poor reception to Very Good reception (sometimes excellent). I know a clean install of Vista may have improved things but the wireless networking shouldn’t have made a difference. Overall much peppier and I can find things much easier.

  • Ken McAvoy

    Nothing in VISTA or W7 has come up that would make either a compelling upgrade. In fact XP suits my hip pocket just fine right now and it has all the features I need or want and I do not need to relearn new ways of doing the same tasks. Its simpler , more intuitive , does not have the same resource hogs , does not suffer from the same degree of code bloat and performance lag.

    I like having the classic start menu ( despite the alternate views being expressed by others sometimes in quite nasty ways) and I greatly appreciated the repair/restore option made available on the original XP CD/DVD that has bailed me out enough times for me to regard that as essential to an OS. Both these functions went missing in W7. I will be skipping both until Microsoft gives me what I want as a consumer. With so many happy XP campers out there (and there are lots) I cannot quite understand why the marketing juggernaut continues to deny XP users what they like. All they are doing is making XP Users further resist the temptation to try something new. It would have been a really smart move by Microsoft to have added those two rather small things back and I reckon they would lower the resistance factor by 70% or more. As it stands the more they try to force Vista and W7 down our throats the more we will resist.

    Ken
    IT Director
    Melbourne

  • zerq

    I tried XP 64 instead of vista because i knew vista would suck,…
    but it turns out microsoft just cant handle the move to 64bit OS…
    i mean its just epic fail on there part!

    so thats when i migrated to linux with windows as virtual machine and xp as alternativ boot up.

    Linux handles 64bit exelently and i only experience a very rare few problems with it.

    and i need to use linux to be able to use all my 8gig ram!

    thank you very much microsoft for sucking so epicaly hard!!!

    I hope more people move over to linux and windows just fall apart of ever and evef!

    if they cant handle a move onto the 64bit architecture then they dont deserve to exist!

    linux has done it, mac osx has done it, bsd has done it…

    hell linux is abalibe to what ever obscure wierd ass architecture you could want including ipod!!

    but big old windows cant manage it without never ending blue screens of death!

  • zerq

    (I am really pissed at them for the fact that i cant use all my 8gb in there bloody os without my computer going into a blue screen of death loop!)

  • Fredd Splatt

    Read this article, it will explain why vista has problems.

    http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

    cheers

    fredd

  • Brian

    Thanks for commenting , I wish Microsoft learn something from the Linux world. There should not be a major OS change like they have been doing for years. It is about making money and that is all this includes all the royalties from people updating there Microsoft Certifications.
    XP should of been the base and just continue to improve and add features . You know it’s stable it works it’s not resource hungry and the driver’s just work.
    Do not get me wrong there is some very nice new features in Vista but all of these features could be added as a update.
    But again it is all about money, eventually in years to come we will have no choice to upgrade to Vista or Windows 7 or whatever system they devise at that time.
    Microsoft has forgot the basic philosophy of customer service the customer is always right.

  • Cameron C. Cook

    Shoot lets just go back to Windows 3.1. It fit on four floppy disks! Easy to work with too. Oh well…

  • http://geeks.pirillo.com/profile/kostas22 Aly

    Personally Ive never bought Vista – its too cpu hungry, and XP works fine anyway. It is getting a bit old now though, so for whatever PC I buy next I think I will install Ubuntu with XP as a VM for compatibility. Linux is the future – we need to get everyone to use it instead of Windows and end this madness!

  • http://deafaccessfilms.com Greg

    Windows XP is the first MS OS I’ve used that has not crashed. That earned its place on my working system. It seems odd that it was not a small improvement over Win 98 or Win2k, it just worked, like Macs had been doing 20 years.

    Personally, I think Gates wanted to see MS put out a satisfactory OS before he retired.

  • General George

    I got a Acer notebook with AMD Turion64 and nvida. 1.3 gig cpu and lots of ram and memory. Vista is ok but it won’t run most of my old Win xp programs. Ones I am use to and like. Also ones I payed a lot of money for. Myrosoft wants to sell you a new os and then make you buy all new software to run with it, Increases the bottom line price several fold. Anyway, I decided to replace the Vista with Winxp media. It seemed to load ok but when I looked at the device manager there was no modem or audio device listed. Acer was useless for advice. I did finally find what the modem was and downloaded the driver fom the modem site. Still no modem showed up in devuce manager. Nothing I have done can get it to reconize a modem. I have been forced to go back to Vista. Bah Humbug. Anyone else have a simular problem?

  • http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=33680708 Xproject187

    I have 32bit Vista SPI on My Notebook & to be honest I’ve often wondered what it would be like to downgrade to XPproSPIII(speed wise)?

    But I’ve managed to stick w/Vista for the better part of 2 years even when SPI caused headaches for many of My clients & friends I sailed rite thru it & as for drivers well once again I’ve been lucky & have always found what I’ve needed “so far that is”..

    But a new hard disc just fell into My lap & I’m tempted now more than ever to give it a whirl.
    Yes I could of set up a dual boot or a VM long ago but I figured I might as well learn Vista’s in’s & out’s now, so that I’m better able to handle any Vista service calls I get & thats the main reason I’ve stuck with it.
    My biggest complaint about Vista is the bloated code that renders it a Hog.
    ~X~