Should I Downgrade To XP?

[CyberShot]

I've personally found vista to be fine, I have full blown vista with all the unneeded extras on my desktop computer and I still don't get why people complain so much. Vista is basically as cheap as XP now, and memory management and the prefetch is actually very useful.

However on my laptop (A few years old) I wanted to reformat so I decided I might as well go for vista, and I decided to download a torrent of a "lite vista". Basically it's a vista with all the crappy services pulled out, for example bluetooth and network printer sharing. You can download them services if you need them.

On my laptop with 1 gig of ram vista felt like it was running faster than any fresh install of XP. So a stripped down vista might work better for you, keeping core windows improvements. Plus mine was only a 700 megabyte download, so might as well give it a spin.

However in contradiction to some people here, I think the driver problems would be absolutely minimal. If the computer is a year old, then I highly doubt any of the hardware will only have vista drivers. Most hardware companies still support windows 2000 for drivers, and if you get a newish SP3 XP installation disc it'll probably have most hardware drivers or at least a generic one which will allow the device to work on.

Make sure you've downloaded the XP driver for your ethernet card, or wireless card before you install XP. So if they aren't supported off the bat you can install their drivers. From there I'm pretty sure windows update will be able to find all your hardware drivers.

[starly]

yes. it was the first thing i did, when i got my notebook. drivers shouldn't be much of a issue as long as you can get online somewhere...

[childofthefence]

Vista is really a piece. Downgrade if you can. I only used it for 2 weeks and became annoyed with it.

[minicoz2]

Yes it is really worth it. Xp is the most reliable OS that existas out there. Vista is nice and all but what I have seen it can get stuck and really slow.

[Artemis]

Ugh. I really hate Vista.
My new laptop came with it...out of the box, new, the laptop with Vista took 10 minutes to load.
So once I got it all set up, I started it up again.
Oh my, only 8 minutes to load now!

What a piece of work. I just hate all the junk on it.
XP is much more stable and reliable, oh, and compatible with everything that you use. Can't say the same for Vista.

[AereoN]

why not try dual boot?
With this way, you can retrain the vista in your pc while using xp at the same time...

Anyway i've been using vista for half a year now and i'm fine with it..

[labrat]

Vista is the reason Bill Gates reigned... DOWNGRADE!!!

[ronjon_00123]

You Can but they stopped selling it in June

[Monsenanna]

You should certainly downgrade, at least untill Microsoft fixes a most of the bugs in Vista. Microsoft should have held back the release of vista, untill they had taken care of most of the bugs, in my opinion.

[rahhbertt]

Vista claims to be "simpler", but its actually more difficult. It takes more effort and searching to customize your computer to your preferences than with XP, which is easy to use and has everything you want.