anybody has gone from vista back to xp?

[DeaconFrost]

I just installed it today

Well, there's part of your problem. You should have gotten the patience plug-in.

I back up all my data on a dynamic drive

A dynamic drive??? Really?

My DVD-Rom disappears from My Computer for no reason so I can't even burn stuff to back them up

Make sure you have the latest chipset drivers loaded....as this should have been one of your very first steps. Is this the first time you've donje a major switch to a new OS? You don't seem to have any patience for the fact that it is different, and that anytime you switch OSes, there are minor things to work out the first time it is installed. Anytime I install a new OS for the first time, I do it twice. Once to get it running stable, and then I redo it properly. Vista even gives you 30 days to do this.

 

[nobody_here]

I have XP with 3.5GB ram (4GB installed).
Much faster and more free ram than with Vista

which would you rather have? 4Gb's of ram and using only 2 or 4Gb's of ram and the system actually using most of it? what performance benefit does free ram give? none

i'd rather be using most of it

 

[Joe Average]

Anytime I install a new OS for the first time, I do it twice. Once to get it running stable, and then I redo it properly.

QFTOAGS... that means Quoted For Truth On A Godly Scale... as it's some of the best advice you'll ever get here or anywhere else, and something I've been doing myself for over 20 years. Absolutely brilliant... I should have reminded people of that aspect of clean installs myself over the years, guess I'll have to remind myself to do it more often.

 

[SuperSubZero]

which would you rather have? 4Gb's of ram and using only 2 or 4Gb's of ram and the system actually using most of it? what performance benefit does free ram give? none

Are there sites that detail these performance increases with real benchmarks?

 

[Monkey God]

which would you rather have? 4Gb's of ram and using only 2 or 4Gb's of ram and the system actually using most of it? what performance benefit does free ram give? none

i'd rather be using most of it

id reverse that, what performance benefit do you get from using all of it? other than pre-caching apps about to be loaded, none.

I found XP to be much snappier and faster than Vista.

 

[Drakul]

You don't seem to have any patience for the fact that it is different, and that anytime you switch OSes, there are minor things to work out the first time it is installed. Anytime I install a new OS for the first time, I do it twice. Once to get it running stable, and then I redo it properly. Vista even gives you 30 days to do this.

I don't call the inability to read a HDD and a disappearing Drive MINOR things.
I've switched many times 3.1, 95? 98 2000, Me, Back to Me, XP, Vista and I'm giving it a few days but i'm getting annoyed.

As far as dynamic drive...I don't recall selecting this option, i mus have not paid attention and will never create one again but that's not the point.
if XP can read it then Vista should, period.

Installing the OS twice isn't a bad idea though.

 

[Joe Average]

The point about Dynamic Drives/Disks is: you can't set up a drive/partition when Windows (any version) is being installed - the default for the OS will be NTFS for the file system using Basic (aka non-Dynamic) capabilities. So, again, I go back to my previous concern about whatever is "seeing" the drives/partitions as Dynamic and thinking there's a problem someplace in there.

 

[Drakul]

I always format all my drives in NTFS
I have no clue why this one wouldn't be.

I'm using recover my files to some success but that's why I'd like my DVD to work properly.

 

[Cobalt2112]

I was on Vista 64 Ultimate SP1 but kept getting a studder while playing UT3 online. So, I killed Vista and installed XP Pro 64 about 3 days ago.

I still have Vista 64 Ultimate SP1 on the other Q6600 rig. I may leave it there for testing purposes (even though we play UT3 there as well) or I may "upgraded" it to XP Pro 64 too.

Just loose the eye candy, which I really dont care for... I rather get stability and responsiveness.

 

[Nenu]

which would you rather have? 4Gb's of ram and using only 2 or 4Gb's of ram and the system actually using most of it? what performance benefit does free ram give? none

i'd rather be using most of it

Its hard to reply to that, its technically illiterate.
XP doesnt need to use more memory and doesnt suffer as a result so what you said makes no sense.

 

[dirtychavez]

Its hard to reply to that, its technically illiterate.
XP doesnt need to use more memory and doesnt suffer as a result so what you said makes no sense.

exactly


I was running vista, i keep trying to like vista but it just doesn't run the games as well. Plus it likes to precache all 4 gigs of my ram, so I run out of memory, vista sucks for me...for now.

 

[heatlesssun]

exactly


I was running vista, i keep trying to like vista but it just doesn't run the games as well. Plus it likes to precache all 4 gigs of my ram, so I run out of memory, vista sucks for me...for now.

Wow, not this again. Why do people keep on insisting to see the world as flat. Yes, Vista uses all your RAM. So what? On a good system it tends to work for your benefit.

As far as game performance, its not Vista. Person after person professional review after professional review have made it pretty clear that Vista's gaming performance is on par with XP. And I suspect that you'll begin to see Vista do better and better as the next gen of hardware comes out where the bulk of users are going to be Vista.

The number of people buying multiple GTX 280's for an XP system will be small indeed.

 

[Gorankar]

Wow, this thread is still going 4 months later. I went to Vista, switched back to Xp til I built my new rig and am now back on Vista64. I had no issues on it with my older rig, (Opty175, X1900xt), i just was more comfortable with Xp at the time. Xp is a great OS, no doubt about it. However, Vista is about 10x better than the hate being spread over the web might make you believe.

Oh, and the ram usage "issue" people keep bringing up.
Total 8190
Cached 7056
Free 26

Total 1209
Paged 1067
Nonpaged 142

That is running 3 instances of F@H and 1 instance of F@Hgpu. No slowdowns whatsoever. When I fire up a game it runs fine. Obviously Vista is freeing whatever ram my apps need, when they need it. So what is the uproar about? The fact that all by itself it uses a few more megs than Xp did, which used more than Win98 did, which used more than Win95 did, which used more than Win3.1 did, which used more than DOS did? You see my point yet?

 

[Atl530i]

I never bothered upgrading to Vista.

 

[Cyrilix]

exactly


I was running vista, i keep trying to like vista but it just doesn't run the games as well. Plus it likes to precache all 4 gigs of my ram, so I run out of memory, vista sucks for me...for now.

When you say something like "so I run out of memory", it'd probably be in your best interest to explain, beyond a very limited user understanding of memory and operating systems, what it actually means. Otherwise, you're just reading into marketing numbers (or in this case, inverse marketing numbers from the task manager, inverse meaning that they work against the benefit of Microsoft).

 

[TerraPhantm]

I just finally switched back. I liked Vista quite a bit, was great when it ran fine, but my installs were nuking themselves far quicker than any of my XP installs did. I don't know if it was any particular fault of mine, but overall my XP installs seem to last longer, so I decided to switch back.

 

[firebane]

I never went to Vista even tho I got a retail copy of Ultimate 32/64 that I got for a good deal sitting on my desk. I worked in IT for some time and used it on a daily basis and simply could not like using it for so many several reasons.

I'll give it credit tho on a few things like the improved user security and how the default user is no longer and admin but more of a super-admin which was what XP failed with.

I'll also give it credit to being able to install faster than XP due to it being a compressed image that gets decompressed onto the hdd.

But the things that bothered me were...

1) Sometimes having two hard drives plugged in during install would have it freak out and you'd have to shut down the system unplug a hard drive and restart the install.

2) UAC - good idea in theory but was poorly executed and should be redone.

3) UI Font - Absolutely can't stand the way it anti-aliases everything and I'm one to NOT use clear type and there is absolutely nothing out there that can fix this. I'm waiting for the Cairo desktop to see if it might fix it otherwise another annoyance.

4) Memory Management - No I'm not gonna complain about how much memory Vista uses because I know how it uses it but it does bug me that for the OS to become optimized it has to learn the ways of you using your computer which becomes a moot point if you say re-install in 3 months and have to start over.

5) Superfetch/Searchable Start Menu - Great ideas but personally just things I never did use nor did like using.

6) Networking - Why does the transfer speeds suffer so much and why is the network setup so much more hidden than XP?

7) Overall UI - Having to tread through multiple menus to find something that would have taken 2 mouse clicks in XP bothered me. Things like trying to adjust desktop colors or find your network settings was just to far out of sorts and difficult to find.

8) Classic Interface - To me this means it looks like Windows2k .. and thats EVERYTHING.. UI.. start menu etc etc etc. But no they took that out and that really was a bad thing.

9) DX10 - At this point in time another useless thing in Vista that isn't really showing any TRUE benefit as this point.

I really honestly tried to appreciate Vista and work with it.. but unfortunately I'm a XP guy until the next version of windows comes out.

 

[Gott]

As someone who runs 4GB of memory, I went with the Vista 64 bit route for obvious reasons. I still like XP but do prefer Vista over it.

A few weeks ago I came across two people talking about new systems and how one of their sound cards wasn't working. I chimed in, not hearing the whole story, and asked if he was running Vista 64 with a Creative card. He got really upset that I even mentioned Vista and started going off on how Vista is the worst operating system ever. He also went on to say that Microsoft directly said Vista is equivalent to Windows ME. Of course I asked him to give me specifics on what is so bad about Vista and he said "You need to do a registry hack to get the task manager working in Vista Home." He then goes on to say that Vista doesn't report processes correctly along with how much memory they're using. Then his one knuckle head friend said he bought a computer with Vista on it and upgraded the video card to a GeForce 7xxxx series card and said it didn't work - he then said he went out and bought a GeForce 7900? and the same problem persisted - a driver issue. "Why should a newer card have problems with Vista?" He blamed Microsoft/Vista for not having up-to-date working drivers. I told him to stop talking right then and there.

Anyways, this person used Vista RC1 for a week and that was it. The moral of this little story is you can't really evaluate software that hasn't been officially released. I think this is where most of the sour apples comes from as Vista went through a lot of growing pains. Now with SP1 out, I can safely and confidently say that Vista as an operating system is top notch. But we do have our own opinion and both XP and Vista are two good OS's.

As firebane has pointed out above, the only gripe I have with Vista is the Network Connection setup. I haven't grown to like Network and Sharing Center.

 

[firebane]

I can absolutely vouch for the nvidia 79xx cards having issues with Vista and if you google it, it was a common problem.

I don't know what was causing it but basically running a 79xx series card would cause horrible screen corruption and you had to figure out how to reset it or reboot the machine... but even then it happened at the login screen.

I got tired of that too and got rid of VIsta hahah.

 

[Gott]

I can absolutely vouch for the nvidia 79xx cards having issues with Vista and if you google it, it was a common problem.

I don't know what was causing it but basically running a 79xx series card would cause horrible screen corruption and you had to figure out how to reset it or reboot the machine... but even then it happened at the login screen.

I got tired of that too and got rid of VIsta hahah.

Lol, the only thing he said was, "It didn't work." He didn't go into detail but that could have been what he was talking about.

Ah well.

 

[Darkatom]

I for one an getting so tempted to reinstall xp 32bit. My main use for this pc is gaming and I have done none of that since installing vista 64. If I dont get sound issues the "nvlddmkm" message is not far behind.

 

[milkweg]

I still have XP on another PC so don't need to go back, although, Vista64 has caused me some grief so I do have another copy of XP that I can always put on it if need be. Bought a FANG gamepad and the driver they provide for Vista64 is 32bit even though they labeled it 64 in the file name. It is a 32bit driver and very beta quality. Have to run 32bit version of Crysis for the Fang to work in it. Their driver never detects the 64bit version of Crysis loading so doesn't load the game profile. Took me a while to figure out why it wasn't working as the game icon in the Games folder is the 64bit version of Crysis.

 

[nessus]

No, but I have an XP VM for working with one piece of software I use that doesn't work in any MS x64 OS. Cisco VPN.

 

[tec805]

Fun to post to kinda old threads. I've tried Vista a number of times since beta and always reverted to XP. Very pretty, my kids loved the bubbles . My wife threated me with divorce when I put Vista on her computer . Kind of a side-grade from XP for most things, but not much of an upgrade for plenty. Change of the UI for the sake of change isn't a good thing. Making people hunt for things, going through more steps to complete a task, isn't helpful . MS may have polled thousands of people what they would like to see in the next Windows, but I think the people they polled were Mac heads that didn't use XP a whole lot.

Plenty of the "tech" crowd that live on these type of boards fail to see that Mom & Dad, Grandma & Grandpa, Friends and Neighbors and other "normal" people have been happily using XP for quite a few years and have little incentive to learn Vista . Not too mention all the bad press Vista has garnered since it's release. Don't even bother trying to tell a business why they should upgrade to Vista (because they want to pay so much in overtime to the IT staff? ) I worked at a hospital in the IT department back when XP was released. I left in 2001, but kept in contact with another IT guy there. They upgraded from Windows 98 to XP in 2005 - something to do with standards and cost and productivity and some other silliness. Does anyone have any first hand experience with a business rolling out Vista to all their systems at this point? I can see very few wanting to make the hardware/software/staff/training/support investment because of the Return On Investment is low (if not nill or maybe even negative?).

Since I buy and setup computers for people & businesses for a living I think I have very good firsthand knowledge of Vista's real-world acceptance and what people are wanting to have on their computer. Last Friday's client wanted to buy a Dell XPS One for his wife, but when I told him it only comes with Vista and Dell doesn't offer XP drivers for it he decided to look at the Vostro selections. Since Dell will still offer XP drivers for Vostro's for many years to come, Dell Business will see a steady increase in sales while Dell Home will see the opposite. I was happy to see Dell making XP drivers available again for some Inspirons that were originally supported only for Vista. Silly to make users track down drivers for components in other fashions (Inspiron 531 - Dell forums can be very helpful).

How many more smilies can I put in this post? Oh well, it's late and I have a Monday morning setup of a new Vostro for an old guy in a small business so I better hit the sack. (Shame there isn't a sleeping smilie!)