new laptop need help

[loccdawg123]

i just bought a new lowend laptop (512ram) for college and it came with vista basic i was just wondering if i should just reformat and put windowsxp because i heard vista eats up alot of ram and i dont have alot to spare. also if i reformat will i need to reinstall all the drivers for the wireless lan and video? the model is toshiba a135-2246 oh yea and ill be using this for microsoft office, internet browsing and mp3s/vids got to head off to work thanks in advance

 

[Negatiiv]

IIRC Vista Basic doesn't come with the Aero interface so I'm thinking it might not eat up as much memory. It will probably take up more than XP normally would but I'd give it a go before you format and see how it goes. 512mb isn't that much even on XP anyways. I haven't run Vista myself on anything less than 2GB, but if it's already installed on your system then you may as well try it out for a day or too before you format, right?

If you did format and install XP, I'm nearly certain you'd have to reinstall your wireless driver, and most likely also your video driver too. Make sure you get some kind of network driver on a cd before you format, just in case you're left without a wired ethernet driver also, heh.