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Posted by: Mark. Mar 26 2008, 04:12 PM

removed

Posted by: DeepRoots Mar 26 2008, 04:18 PM

as far as i am aware changing operating system shouldnt be a problem. make sure you backup up all of the files yo wish to keep prior to doing so and also right down a list of what software you will need to reinstall or any freeware you may have to download again after changing to xp.

i dont blame you for changing- xp is great

Posted by: Bogdan Mar 26 2008, 04:23 PM

Well you can format your hard drive and delete vista and everything there is on it..Than you install xp without problems on a clean hard drive
Be sure to backup all because you will have to reinstall programs etc..

Posted by: Dejan Mar 26 2008, 04:34 PM

just make sure you have proper drivers for XP, lots of "designed for Vista" laptops don't have drivers for XP.

and when you have the drivers you can format the disk and install XP

if your XP installation cannot find hard disk during installation, than you have to disable SATA mode in BIOS

that's it

Posted by: Mark. Mar 26 2008, 04:35 PM

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Posted by: kevin-riff-after-riff Mar 26 2008, 06:47 PM

nothing works on vista, i still got it on, but im seling my computer and gettin a new when as soon as i save up enough and i am NOT putting vista on ever again

Posted by: Kaneda Mar 26 2008, 07:24 PM

You might want to get a free diagnostics program (Everest, for example) before you reinstall, and run it, then save its output, so you have a nice list of the hardware in the computer, in case you need to install drivers for it on XP (which isn't very friendly when it comes to naming system hardware, so sometimes it's a bothersome search in order to find it).

As for Vista... I really don't get what all the complaints are about... In my opinion, Vista was a big step forward. A much bigger, and more needed, step than 2000->XP (but then, I guess, most people who like XP like it because they went straight from Win98). XP added nothing new that was actually useful. But it did have the same migration problems as Vista apparently does now.

I've had no unsolvable problems on Vista - and I even have the 64 bit version I'd never want to switch back (except I have to, every day, when I go to work )

Posted by: erik Mar 26 2008, 10:58 PM

You don't have to back up system programs. But make shure that all of you system components are capable with XP (I doubt that any of them won't work with XP though). And you might have to go online and find drivers to them (such as the sound board ect. but they're usually easy to find, go to the manufacturers' web sites and click on "support" or downloads" or something.


btw your signature fill almost my entire screen.. It's a little annoying You think you could make a smaller one?..

Posted by: Trond Vold Mar 26 2008, 11:15 PM

Be careful.. a friend of mine tried to lose vista and get XP on it, but some of the components like the NIC was almost completely impossible to get working in XP. The device ID database was no help for it either.

The GFX card drivers had to be chisseled in too, but we got that working.

Posted by: Bogdan Mar 27 2008, 12:02 AM

Yeah programs you installed afterwards...Not system ones..Also every data such as music, tabs etc..

Posted by: USAMAN Mar 27 2008, 12:05 AM

Im not sure but you could probably use both.....I was using 98 and xp on the same system at one time....ask an expert but it should be possible to dual boot.

Posted by: Trond Vold Mar 27 2008, 12:06 AM

Dual boot is very possible yes.
But then XP would have had to be installed first. Vista will overwrite the bootsector (i think).

Posted by: Pablo Vazquez Mar 27 2008, 12:28 AM

Hey men, there is a lot of people who have problems with Vista! But many of my friends think it´s great... I´m confused

Posted by: Trond Vold Mar 27 2008, 12:31 AM

I think it depends on what your going to use it for.
I find vista to be completely useless, because the drivers thats available for my soundcars are still pretty crap. But if i want to play a newer game, i might boot into vista and play it.

Posted by: Pablo Vazquez Mar 27 2008, 12:40 AM

Ok!! I´m understanding!

Posted by: Pablo Vazquez Mar 27 2008, 12:40 AM

Posted by: g-forcelover Mar 27 2008, 01:19 AM

god i hate vista. i got a podcast studio firewire recording package, it amazing. but it dosent work on vista so of cousre i have to return it, i would of loved to record, i had to drop out of pavel's last colab cause of vista.

Posted by: Mark. Mar 27 2008, 09:24 AM

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Posted by: JCJXXL Mar 27 2008, 12:22 PM

Vista is COMPLETE GARBAGE. It is NOT a step forward (as mentioned earlier).
It is a HUGE memory hog and has compatibility problems left and right.

We have done literally thousands of rollbacks from Vista to XP and the first thing everyone says is "Wow! My computer is fast! And it works!"

There is absolutely nothing new with Vista in regards to "what's under the hood". It's all visuals. No thanks. I'll pass on the visuals. I'd rather have a computer that works. If you like the widgets and visuals then download a Vista transformation pack for Windows XP. Eye candy is not enough of a reason ( for me at least) to stick with Vista.

As mentioned earlier you will want to know the hardware BEFORE wiping Vista. Someone mentioned Everest (good tool) or you could even just go to the device manager and make a list of the drivers you'll need (video, audio, ethernet, modem,etc).

The manafacturer of the computer may not have Windows XP drivers but that shouldn't stop you. You should be able to get the drivers based on component manufacturer, chipset maker.

If you decide to go forward with the change to Windows XP send me a PM with the make and model of your computer. I have literally hundreds of drivers saved from all of the Vista to XP conversions we've done.

GOOD LUCK!

Posted by: visi0n Mar 27 2008, 12:40 PM

Hey Mark,

I readed the comments, but i also want to give an advice, it is possible to install Windows XP, but there can be problems with compatibility with some hardware on it, that may not work with Windows XP, for more information you can come to the place where i work maybe, its called www.informatique.nl i dont know where you live i saw The Netherlands in your profile

Cheers.

Ekrem

Posted by: Mark. Mar 27 2008, 05:18 PM

removed

Posted by: JCJXXL Mar 27 2008, 11:58 PM

If you have a driver for the hardware that allows it to communicate with the operating system then there is no compatibility problem. Hardware doesn't which operating system is installed. It only knows if the driver running it works with the operating system.

Posted by: Kaneda Mar 28 2008, 06:53 PM

This (sorry to go off topic) is true for XP vs. 2000, but is so utterly and completely untrue for Vista vs. XP that it's not even funny. What XP added to 2000 was theming, a few application-level features (like remote desktop and a dreadful CD burning implementation that no one uses), and an attempt to make applications built for the 95/98/Me line compatible by way of installable "tweaks". Other than that, support for hyper-threading, which is all but abandoned now. There's a reason for the 5.1 version number.

The relative multitude (at least compared to XP) of new "user level improvements" in Vista are well documented. But the real meat is on the system level, since that's where the future is built anyway -- user features can and will be replaced by better 3rd party components, always. So...

Vista's graphics, audio, networking and printing architectures have been completely redesigned. The kernel has been heavily updated in terms of stability, reliability and taking advantage of hardware. A new driver model for graphics allows for a smooth performance of the visual UI that would never be possible on the XP driver model. And we're not just talking eye candy here -- after all, the visual UI is more than half of the computer's feedback to you, the user. The redesigned graphics and UI architectures allow innovations in user interface design to be easily implemented, rather than forced onto a system which will moan and complain and crash.

The multimedia part of the equation goes a long way towards eliminating the mediocre media handling (in terms of timing, persistent frame rates and tearing, as well as hideous codec management) that marred XP -- although it's still far from perfect.

The new audio stack is, quite frankly, amazing -- and totally overlooked by everyone, not least by the musicians whose applications will actually be able to take advantage of it...

Both the subsystem redesigns and the new driver model bring things to where they should have been at the introduction of Windows 98. And the stuff mentioned here is just the tip of the iceberg. In the short run, application and driver developers will be happy. In the long run, the users will be.

Unless magazines and tech experts who go with the flow manage to scare all the users off, of course.

Vista was labeled a technology release. Adding countless new features to any system will up the requirements. You can only optimize performance to a certain point. And no, Vista will not run better on a 1.5Ghz 512MB machine than XP. Probably not even on a 3Ghz 2GB machine. But comparing my 8GB quad-core machine (when only using 3GB) on XP and Vista, everyday use is more smooth -- and, yes, faster -- on Vista. And I am the kind of person who refuses to spend his time on fiddling with optimizing hardware and tweaking system settings -- it just has to work. In my case -- and I'll dare say most other cases -- it does. In a year or less, it will work for 99.4815162342% of users, and after a few more years (depending on MS' release schedule), everyone will complain about Windows 7 and proclaim everywhere how they just "upgraded to Vista"

I've seen this kind of argument with every release of Windows -- at least since 3.1

Posted by: Mark. Mar 28 2008, 07:05 PM

removed

Posted by: JCJXXL Mar 28 2008, 10:46 PM

This post is not meant to be taken as an attack or in any other negative manner. Just me stating my opinion based on my background and my experience with the multitude of people I deal with on a regular basis regarding their computers.





Sorry, let me reword my earlier statement... there is absolutely nothing NEW AND USEFUL about Vista.
Yes they may have some new features (such as UAC....CONTINUE OR CANEL prompts everywhere) and redesigned a few things (looks like OS X and IE looks like FIREFOX) but that doesn't make it better or original.

Ask the thousands of users out there who experience problems on a daily basis with Vista. It all comes down to performance. Vista does not support alot of hardware and software.. And it's not just the older stuff but newer stuff as well. And I guess the HUGE degradation to performance is a new added feature as well eh? But that's OK because everyone is in the position of replacing their computer they just bought 6 months ago with a newer one just to run a grossly bloated incompatible operating system.

Look at Mark's previous post...
"Well I must admit that I like vista, outside the fact that somethings don't work on it ."

Speaking of added features, another huge disappointment is WINFS.. what happened to that? It got pulled before Vista was release. But wasn't that one of their big bragging points as to why Vista would be better?

You can't argue with real world experience/data. And no I am not your average tech going with the flow. In fact, I rarely go with the crowd when it comes to IT because then I would be just another so-so tech doing average work.

I agree with what you said about it working for the majority of people in the future, but Vista is not a reliable operating system RIGHT NOW to justify the switch.... especially for business environments. And if Vista is so great why are we expected to have a completely revamped Windows operating system in 3 short years? That's about half of the average amount of time between releases. And I find it odd that sales of MACs have increased since Vista release... LOL... and no I am not a MAC fan. Both of those facts are somewhat big indications of Vista's limited fan base.

Let's say you bought a car a year ago.. It runs great.. reliable.. no problems...

Then the newer model is released.. so you decide to get it. Every morning when you wake up to go to work you don't know for 110% certainty that you'll make it on time or even at all. Because this new model of car sometimes stalls... crashes... won't start.. the steering wheel isn't the same as what a normal car has..... everyday fuel doesn't work in it on a consistent basis. It's basically a gamble as to whether you are going to be able to make a living from day to day because you have an unreliable piece of equipment that you count on for allowing you to earn a paycheck. Oh but wait... there new seats are shiney, the handles are pretty, the paint style is different.... Would you keep the car just for the looks?


One last thing.. interesting Bill Gates statement:

Posted by: fused Mar 29 2008, 01:40 AM

Have you tried running apps as admin, setting compatibility levels to say win2000, all those kinds of things?

Also, a little trick may be to install your games under a folder that runs directly under the root. For example, C:\MyGame. Vista has a horrible amount of security on Program Files and anything under the window's folders such as say, system32. And if your app requires making changes to data files, you'll be prompted for UAC clearance by entering an admin user/Pw every stinking time you need to do something.

But maybe first make sure that YOU are an admin on your PC and THEN log in as YOU and run apps as admin.
For example, right click on the .exe name and you'll see "Run as administrator"... Try that.

AND right click on .exe, under properties, you'll see a compatibility tab, go there and see if it will run under a compat mode. I've done this for a few old games and it worked great.

But all in all, Vista is a horrible excuse for an OS. I had to hack the thing to get an app to run for a huge corporation.
They didn't want to rewrite a massive app, so I was tasked at breaking into this mess and getting it to run. Without the end user dealing with UAC prompts. It took me a month to do it, but I did. Had to mess with a little code but mostly, get the app the heck out of the reach of Vista's security. Thats where the C:\MyApp comes into play. Vista doesn't secure user folders under the root the same as it does in its sys regions.

Good luck with that.

Oh by the way, I'm typing right now on a Vista lap top. I hate the thing. A month after I bought this I went out and armed a brand new IMAC and brought it home. Was more $$$ than this crap but its an awesome machine. It just works, this Vista thing....I may someday just place it under the back wheels of my truck and peel out on it.

Posted by: Kaneda Mar 29 2008, 08:04 AM

Ditto. It's all in good fun

I'll also add that what is most important here, and what we can agree on, is that Vista wasn't made for old computers. What bugs me is that the people who install it on old computers anyway and get a performance decrease out of it, make people think that their new 16GB octa-core computer will run better with XP. That's my issue.

In other words, no, Vista isn't for everyone. It's not for as few people as the computer magazines and tech experts want us to believe either, though.



Doesn't change my counter-statement. There was nothing new and useful about XP. There are literally thousands of new and useful features in Vista. A lot of them are only starting to be useful now, as programmers start using them to benefit the users.



Ask the millions of users who don't.

As I said, performance is better on Vista than XP on most, if not all, desktop computers sold today, laptops soon to follow (and in a large percentage of cases, users won't miss the tiny amount of performance lost on their new laptop). In any case, I have no need for more performance at the moment. Running Photoshop, Visual Studio 2008 and Sonar side by side (not to mention Firefox, Messenger, Thunderbird, AVG antivirus etc., as well as all my commonly used programs loaded into memory in the background by Vista, ready for use), while playing back an HD video, my counters say 23% RAM used, fluctuating around 10% CPU. I've yet to see RAM usage above 40%.

Please note: The price of my computer has already dropped 30%. In three months, it's outdated.



95, XP and Me didn't support a lot of hardware and software either, but no one seems to remember.

And nope, not everyone is in the position of replacing their computer (my old computer, until 2 months ago, for example, was from 2001), which is why XP is still supported until mid-2009, and will receive security updates until 2011 or later.



Exactly. Because Vista is, again, a technology release. With a complete rewrite of every major subsystem. One (1!) of those many subsystems was pulled.



Real world experience/data would indicate that it's not a majority of users who are experiencing problems. Can you argue with that? Sure you can And most do. As is usually the case, the users who do have problems scream very loudly and persistently (not meaning you -- you're not screaming )



Sorry, I did not intend to imply you were. But I've met a lot of them, who can't even say exactly why they think Vista sucks, other than "PC World said this".



For me it was. For anyone who doesn't expect to fit a wooden square peg into a circular hole and turn it to gold, it is.

Now, we're not consulting businesses in this thread. That said, I just finished an application for a major Danish bank (with branches in most of Northern Europe). They have a huge technical department. That department decided to switch to Vista for security and reliability reasons, and guess what? No problems. All their experts could justify the switch.

And no, 3 years is not half the average. Since 1985, 15 major versions of Windows have been released. From 1.0 to Vista. That's 15 releases in 23 years. Even if we ignore pure-NT and only count 3.0, 95, 98, 98SE, Me, XP and Vista, that's 7 in 17 years. Average amount of time: 17/7 = new release of Windows every 2.4 years.

Mac... I am a Mac fan. And Mac sales started to increase long before MS even made the name "Vista" public -- when the iPod became popular, making the Apple brand once again visible in the consumer's mind. Adding to that, since the late 90's non-product-related branding has been all the rage.

Apple is the prime example of how well persistent focus on branding your company can work -- artists vs business school graduates. I hate business school graduates. Apple's success does not have a shred to do with Vista, especially since Vista didn't magically appear on the old computers of the people who were contemplating buying a new one. The person who switches from a 2007 Windows-based laptop to a Mac is a rare breed. The one who switches from a 2000 laptop to a Mac is more common.



I hate cars. Can you make a motorcycle analogy instead, please? Nah, anyway, my "old car" wouldn't let me do proper typographic design in anything except Adobe InDesign, because the OS support for OpenType sucked. That's a problem for me, much more so than a loss of 4-8% of performance would be. Vista (and WPF) allows that to soon change. Just one of several examples.

In your analogy, you didn't just buy the newer model, you decided to transplant the fuel injection, one of the cylinders and various springs from the suspension of the old model into your new car, using gaffer tape since you couldn't find any screws, plus add some aftermarket parts designed for the old model because the suppliers haven't started stocking the parts for the new model (basically, they await the result of the FUD campagin all the car mags have been spewing onto the public about the new model).

Trying to do this is understandable, but it's not what the car company intended. They may have communicated their intention badly (or their sales department told them they should get everyone to upgrade). But for some reason, that cylinder won't quite fit, even if you bang it with a hammer, so you complain.

And, erm, no: Even after making a patch job out of your car (once again, understandably), the car doesn't stall, crash or refuse to start. It might give you problems, like the suspension isn't quite as smooth as it could be

I've yet to see a Vista user's computer freeze, crash or refuse to boot (as a side note, most examples of Windows freezing in the past, has been about badly written drivers -- now MS decided to control driver releases very strictly, and of course -- and understandably -- people complain).



Interesting. My bank account does quite fine. I don't think I'm gambling?! Oh noes, what if I am!?

You don't keep the car for the looks. You keep it since it's the first major redesign of the car since 1999, with new features that actually make sense from both a personal and business perspective, and an engine that allows for fun and efficiency you never imagined (and hasn't been imagined yet by most people) well into the future.

The one major reason the visuals are there, is because that's what gets people in the short run. It's the only way to sell the interesting stuff inside, that people can't see (yet). That said, I'm the kind of person who turned off the XP Playmobil theme to use the Windows Classic theme, and turned off shadows under the mouse cursor etc. Didn't bother to do that on Vista, because -- for once -- it actually does look nice -- and again, my soon-to-be-outdated computer won't care if it's on or off.

If MS decide to drop any of these innovations in Windows 7 because users still haven't gotten used to how the PC market evolves, I'm done with MS. Because for once they looked into the future rather than playing catch up. That's what makes it a step forward.

Posted by: JCJXXL Mar 29 2008, 02:53 PM

Kaneda, are you kidding me? LOL!

I'm convinced you must have been part of the Vista development team. Those are the only people who think it's great.

1) Not matter how you dress it up, Vista does not work. Whether on a brand new machine purchased this morning or one a year old. Look at Mark's comment again... he is on a new laptop and still some applications won't work for him. He is just one of the millions of people expriencing this problem.

2) It's a resource hog, poorly designed and has compatibility issues.

3) XP does run faster than Vista on newer machines... I see this EVERYDAY

4) But the bottom line is that people are hugely disappointed, people are frustrated and compatiblity problems do exist. And it's not just a few people screaming loudly. It's ALOT. One thing I remind our employees is that when someone describes a problem they aren't imagining it. It does exist. Why would so many people make up lies about Vista's compatibility issues? Are we all just bored and have nothing better to do with our time? Is it a conspiracy to prevent the world's best operating system from succeeding? Of course not. At the end of the day all people want is to be able to use the computer...Vista does not allow that.

Enjoy your Vista... No one else does

Thanks for the conversation. Good topic!

You know I just received about 30 shirts from a distributor of ours. About 4 of them were Vista tshirts. Had I know you were such a fan of Vista I wouldn't have thrown them away

Posted by: Kaneda Mar 29 2008, 05:40 PM

Sorry, you're exaggerating grossly, which tends to lead a discussion nowhere...

There are plenty of people who think it's awesome, great, good or OK. It only takes a simple Google search to find them.

But this is the general rule of internet postings: No matter if the topic is a new TV, a vacuum cleaner or an OS, the number of people who post on a problem outnumber the ones posting that "everything's great" around 15:1 or more. Simply because the former tends to have more news value than the latter (which is also why you rarely see "everything's going great in [insert country here]" on the news). Of course, in this specific case, the problem posts give Linux evangelists and Mac devotees a field day spreading as much doubt and uncertainty as they possibly can Again, not talking of this thread, just the general state of the internet right now.



Guess what? Vista isn't the only OS in the world where "some applications won't work". Half my old games collection (which admittedly is small) didn't work under XP. My antivirus, my CD burning program, and most importantly, my audio workstation programs, didn't work. All in spite of them working on 2000, which XP was only a minor upgrade of. I had to switch to other ones.

That's the tough reality of any OS upgrade. Hundreds of applications that worked on OSX Panther don't work on Leopard either. Linux applications tend to be reconfigured and rebuilt between kernel versions and distributions for this very reason. That's the nature of computer evolution.

Also, your three implied wishes clash with each other:

- substantial new features often require subsystem redesigns
- subsystem redesigns mean less compatibility
- compatibility is then achieved through emulation and wrappers
- emulation and wrappers take resources to execute

You get nothing for free.



I need you to actually qualify what makes it poorly designed compared to XP. Visually? Internally? "Resource hog" is a grand word. Norton/Symantec antivirus is a resource hog, no version of Windows in and of itself really qualifies. When my computer is idle, the CPU meter is dancing between 0 and 1%. I want my 0.5% back, Microsoft We already agreed on compatibility issues.

When there is a slowdown (which has yet to be actually noticeable for me on a new computer), the main reason is that current applications do not take advantage of the new subsystem designs. So the old subsystems are emulated/wrapped. Which is also nothing new. DOS apps ran slower under Win95/NT and later too. But we're not getting anywhere here.



Again, same thing happened with 95, Me and (not least) XP. Made me wait 2 years before "upgrading".



No one ever indicated the issues were made up. What's made up, or rather, grossly exaggerated, not least in the uninformed public's mind, is the amount of issues, especially on new computers, and especially compared to previous Windows releases.

And without exaggeration applied, Vista does allow you to use your computer. So did MS-DOS. Maybe if we'd all stuck with that, everything would be better, and we wouldn't have to go through two years of "[new OS release] sucks" posts spamming the web.



Google disagrees.



I would never wear a t-shirt with anything computer related, so no thanks. And to say that something is a step forward, and backing it up, does not a fan make. I will (and have) criticize(d) MS when they do something wrong (as they mostly do, from IE to video management to file format choices to C# 3.0), I'll also feel free to voice my opinion when I disagree on their supposed wrong-doings, though.

Last post, since we're not really getting anywhere. Nice conversation, though

Posted by: JCJXXL Mar 30 2008, 02:06 AM

LOL!!! Great discussion. LOL.

Posted by: Trond Vold Mar 30 2008, 02:09 AM

Great discussion indeed An entertaining read

Posted by: JCJXXL Mar 30 2008, 02:12 AM

Yes it does disagree with your opinion on Vista being a great OS.
A simple "vista is a great operating system" in Google turns up plenty of info showing the downside to Vista.

Now try putting in Vista Sucks or Vista Compatibility Problems,etc. A more direct search aimed towards finding negative Vista info. Wow.. the results.

Anyway, thanks for the discussion. I'm out.