I am going to format my Dell XPS M1530 tonight and was thinking of going back to XP any thought on this just curious to know your opinion's on this, I use windows 7 at the moment
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I don't really see the point to it nowadays... With windows Vista it was kinda understanding, but nowadays with windows 7 (and windows 8 comming right up) it doesnt make much sense... Actually, I doubt most recent things will run in XP anymore, I recall buying some new progs for school last spring and they wouldn't work on a windows xp they had in school, but worked with the newer OS's... It's really risky to use such an outdated operating system seeing as most stuff are already supported by windows 7...
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XP is good if you want to run a Media Server, but these days, not good for much else. Windows 7 has fixed ALMOST all of the problems of Vista, and improved on a lot of things I liked in XP.
Windows 7 is vastly better, and Windows 8 is being designed to run faster than XP even on old hardware. Additionally, it's on extended support, and that means less updates, which results in less security.
It was understandable when Vista came out, since it demanded the latest and greatest hardware (which barely anybody had at the time) and had various issues, but with 7 being out for over 2 years and Windows 8 coming around the bend, there's tons of reasons not to downgrade.
It was understandable when Vista came out, since it demanded the latest and greatest hardware (which barely anybody had at the time) and had various issues, but with 7 being out for over 2 years and Windows 8 coming around the bend, there's tons of reasons not to downgrade.
Sounds like someone really liked XP, I know the feel bro'. I have XP on my work comp and didn't upgrade to Vista as I didn't care for it after seeing it on my gf's comp. By the time 7 rolled around, XP was like an old pair of comfy shoes. The Office Suite on XP is far simpler, and sometimes simpler is better (although I don't see Office being the dealbreaker if you're posting this question on a gaming site.)
Despite my obvious bias, I too would not recommend downgrading a comp's preinstalled operating system to an outdated OS. It's apparent that there are features on XP that are causing you to consider this move and you should first make sure that these features are non-existent in 7; although you'll probably find that this is not the case.
Despite my obvious bias, I too would not recommend downgrading a comp's preinstalled operating system to an outdated OS. It's apparent that there are features on XP that are causing you to consider this move and you should first make sure that these features are non-existent in 7; although you'll probably find that this is not the case.
You probably want to stay on Windows 7, but if you elaborate a bit on what you intend to use this install for it would be easier to give you a better idea of how (un)viable XP would be. Since it's a laptop, are you going to use it on random wireless networks? What type of games if any are you going to play on it? Do you care more about aesthetics and interface or software performance?
Summary of spoiler: Windows 7 is a better OS than XP for the vast majority of people, but not for everyone and there are reasons to use it.
Reasons to use XP on hardware that can also handle Vista and 7: XP offers better backward compatibility with old games and has few (a small number of) hotkeys and interface features absent in Vista and 7. XP is much smaller in size than Vista and 7 can also be slimmed down a lot more than them. The important consequence of this rather than saving disk space is that a performance gain can be had as no performance needs to be wasted for features that are not used.
Reasons to use 7 instead of XP: Mostly summarized in Rydian's post.
Wall of text incoming. I won't hold it against you if you don't read this and I am providing a summary below the spoiler.
I'll start by getting the most important thing out of the way: Windows 7 is a better choice for the vast, vast majority of people. If asked by a person what Windows OS they should install, I certainly generally don't hesitate to say "Windows 7" and neither should anyone else.
Asking a question such as "Why would you go back to XP?", implying that there is no benefit whatsoever in doing so, is however inappropriate because there are a lot of reasons to do it (which I'll get back to below). I think you have displayed your anti-XP stance in many posts in the past and, while what you say is many times true and warranted, you make things sound far too black and white. I don't actually believe this post of mine is going to change your stance, but I'm going to try by providing some arguments for why XP actually isn't the completely obsolete OS you make it out to be.
Before I start I'll mention that I have the impression that your philosophy in helping people on this forum is to keep it simple. While I often don't take this approach myself, I respect you for doing it and think that posts might indeed many times be more helpful when kept simple this way. What I dislike however, is when such simplifications imply things that absolutely aren't true when it can be avoided. For technical details this is often not a big deal, but it is when it comes to whether XP, the 2nd most used OS in the world, is completely and entirely useless when there is Windows 7 or not. As mainly an XP user, I strongly dislike how widespread the idea that Windows 7 is better for everyone (who has a decent computer) seems to have become. I wish more people, and here I'm talking about people who have at least a bit of an interest in and knowledge of computers, would stop spreading this false idea.
On to reasons to use XP. For starters, major software updates of any type of software have a tendency to not only add and change existing features, it also often happens that features are removed. Windows Vista, being a very large update from XP, especially in comparison with the update of Windows 7 from Vista, was no exception. Now, the point here is not that Windows Vista didn't bring good changes (which it certainly did) or that the features added weren't worth the weight of the features removed or even that good features were removed. The point is that it is a fact that Vista, and consequently 7, does not offer certain functionality offered by XP.
This is logically an undeniable reason to use XP, the OS provides functionality that its successors doesn't. But was there actually any good functionality changed for the worse or removed? A highly subjective question of course, but there were certainly far more things drastically changed and removed than in the minuscule Facebook updates that a lot of people tend to rage a lot at. As I don't think my own subjective opinion of which of the removed and changed features were good is particularly relevant to the discussion, I'll just put a small list of things that I can think of looking at the Wikipedia article linked above in a spoiler. Not to repeat myself too much, but again the point here is that XP offers features which Windows 7 does not. This is a reason to use XP. (Note that I am of course not trying to get away from the fact that Windows 7 also offers a lot of features that XP doesn't and offers a lot more more features in total.)
While I dislike the changes and removal of the features mentioned above, it's no deal breaker for me (even if not being able to play some of my favorite games in particular would be a pretty big loss for when I would occasionally want to play them). I'd definitely use Windows 7 all the time except when playing those old games if the features above were the only thing XP offered that Windows 7 doesn't. But XP offers something else: performance. Performance is in general indeed pretty irrelevant for most people who just want to use their computer, but for a power user it is one of the most important things.
I've read about various performance improvements in Vista and 7. Many parts of the OS have been improved at the low level. Memory is handled better, the NT scheduler does a better job and there's better support for new hardware technology such as Hyperthreading, SSDs and hardware acceleration for graphics. I don't doubt that these things increase the perfomance, but when they are taken out of context they don't mean much. What matters is the performance of the OS in total.
I have two ~3GHz P4 computers with 1GB of RAM and some mid tier graphic cards (from 2004), a 1,6GHz Atom@1,8GHz Netbook with 2GB of RAM (from 2009) and my main computer which has a 2,44GHz C2D @3,6GHz, 4GB RAM and an 8800GTS640MB graphics card (from late 2007). No SSDs except on the netbook. Now, none of this hardware is particularly new, but neither is it ancient. I've had Windows 7 SP1 installed on all of these machines except one of the two from 2004 and the performance has ranged from completely unacceptable to vastly inferior in comparison with XP. To be noted is that I don't play many new games (for starters I don't play games much at all) which sets me apart from a lot of other Windows users who I imagine can draw benefit from the improvements in Windows 7.
I've noticed superior performance in Windows 7 for one thing; copying files, in particular to USB devices. Apart from that, I had ridiculously slower boot and shutdown times on the non-main computers and noticeably slower perfomance when doing virtually anything on them (the 2004 computer would go over to using the page file as soon as Firefox was opened on 7 Ultimate, otherwise basically when Firefox and one more program was opened). Visual Studio was a complete joke to use on the netbook and 2004 computer whereas it worked flawlessly in XP on the 2004 computer and arguably acceptable, although not good, on the netbook. Photoshop was somehow even worse than Visual Studio on the 2004 computer.
But let's forget these arguably underpowered machines and move over to my main computer. While it was a complete nightmare to have Windows 7 on the computer from 2004 and a pretty bad experience on the netbook as well, the same cannot be said for my main computer. It was by any standard acceptable and I had it installed as my main OS for a pretty long period (5-7 months, I don't know exactly). But, with a boot time more than twice that of XP's, Visual Studio starting almost twice as slow and compiling noticably slower and ~0.5GB (of the ~3 of my 4 I use) more memory eaten by the OS I eventually went back.
Can what I'm saying really be true, is XP actually that superior in performance for certain new (according to its own index) hardware? A fact that might be contributing a lot to my results might be that Windows 7 cannot be modified to the extent that XP can. I try to not have anything that I don't have any use of in my installations, something which increases performance a lot. By default my retail XP Professional installs to ~3GB whereas Vista and 7 Ultimate install to ~25GB and ~15GB respectively. A search for "MicroXP" gives you a ready-to-go pretty slimmed installation disc around 100MB in size. When installed I end up with a partition where around 300MB is used after installing my own drivers. This is to compare with Windows 7 where the smallest disc I found was 700MB and installed to 9GB.
The difference in disk space itself isn't important, but it gives an idea of the character of the OS. Windows 7 is a very feature rich OS whereas XP comparatively isn't. The features that Windows 7 provide range from allowing you to be more productive to ensuring your safety and preventing your computer from being taken over. That XP lacks a lot of features in these and other areas makes Windows 7 a better choice for a great majority of users. But not for everyone.
A power user can as opposed to other users want to have as little functionality as possible. This can even include security functionality, as a power user doesn't necessarily need their OS to handle security for them, instead of them handling it themselves before it comes down to the OS. Not through magical super powers, but through ensuring that their computer is running in a safely firewalled environment and that any software that for some reason could be a security thread is run on another computer/OS installation than the one they want to be as fast as possible. The thing is that you are in fact wasting performance for every feature that the OS supplies, and therefore loads and manages, that you aren't using.
For a power user who doesn't care much about the interface changes/additions introduced in Vista/7 (or interface in general), doesn't care much about any of the additions and changes to the Windows API and wants as little features in their OS as possible, the gain in performance when that can be had when using XP is a huge reason to use it. I'm not saying it's the best for all power users as there probably are many who are interested in the interface and usability improvements and want security for one reason or another.
Asking a question such as "Why would you go back to XP?", implying that there is no benefit whatsoever in doing so, is however inappropriate because there are a lot of reasons to do it (which I'll get back to below). I think you have displayed your anti-XP stance in many posts in the past and, while what you say is many times true and warranted, you make things sound far too black and white. I don't actually believe this post of mine is going to change your stance, but I'm going to try by providing some arguments for why XP actually isn't the completely obsolete OS you make it out to be.
Before I start I'll mention that I have the impression that your philosophy in helping people on this forum is to keep it simple. While I often don't take this approach myself, I respect you for doing it and think that posts might indeed many times be more helpful when kept simple this way. What I dislike however, is when such simplifications imply things that absolutely aren't true when it can be avoided. For technical details this is often not a big deal, but it is when it comes to whether XP, the 2nd most used OS in the world, is completely and entirely useless when there is Windows 7 or not. As mainly an XP user, I strongly dislike how widespread the idea that Windows 7 is better for everyone (who has a decent computer) seems to have become. I wish more people, and here I'm talking about people who have at least a bit of an interest in and knowledge of computers, would stop spreading this false idea.
On to reasons to use XP. For starters, major software updates of any type of software have a tendency to not only add and change existing features, it also often happens that features are removed. Windows Vista, being a very large update from XP, especially in comparison with the update of Windows 7 from Vista, was no exception. Now, the point here is not that Windows Vista didn't bring good changes (which it certainly did) or that the features added weren't worth the weight of the features removed or even that good features were removed. The point is that it is a fact that Vista, and consequently 7, does not offer certain functionality offered by XP.
This is logically an undeniable reason to use XP, the OS provides functionality that its successors doesn't. But was there actually any good functionality changed for the worse or removed? A highly subjective question of course, but there were certainly far more things drastically changed and removed than in the minuscule Facebook updates that a lot of people tend to rage a lot at. As I don't think my own subjective opinion of which of the removed and changed features were good is particularly relevant to the discussion, I'll just put a small list of things that I can think of looking at the Wikipedia article linked above in a spoiler. Not to repeat myself too much, but again the point here is that XP offers features which Windows 7 does not. This is a reason to use XP. (Note that I am of course not trying to get away from the fact that Windows 7 also offers a lot of features that XP doesn't and offers a lot more more features in total.)
List formatted in some cool way.
Games: The removal of various functionality has decreased compatability with older games. Dosbox does a pretty fine job for DOS games, but many games written for 9x depend on functionality removed in Vista and thus cannot be run on Vista and or 7. For me personally this is a particularly big problem as I generally play old games more often than new ones and I can't get some of my favorites to run in Windows 7 (in particular Heroes 2-3 with expansions, Hexen 2 with expansion and Heretic 2, they either don't work at all or eventually crash for me in 7).
The 'shutdown' command: I use this command on almost a daily basis on XP. Before I leave my house in the morning or go to bed at night I often start download(s), something I know many others do as well. What I do though, is that I set my computer to shutdown after the download(s) are completed based on the ETA with some margin which works very well. This way my computer doesn't stay on for 7 hours for no reason. On Windows 7 this feature is practically useless for this purpose as the maximum time you can delay the shutdown is 10 minutes.
Explorer: Several features that exist in XP's Explorer were removed in Vista (and therefor don't exist in 7). The Ctrl+Enter hotkey to open the selected folder in a new window, probably the Explorer-specific hotkey that I use the most, was removed. The ability to undo several delete operations was removed. The filename of the file currently being copied, moved or delete when operating on folders was removed. The functionality to view the icons of many old 16-bit games was removed. The ability to preserve permissions when copying files to different drives was removed (of relevance to me is that this breaks backing up environments such as Cygwin and therefor caused me a lot of unexpected problems when I was unaware of this change). Folders are always autorefreshed, which means that you won't know where in the list of files that files that were just moved, copied, or extracted to the folder you have open will appear and thus have to look for them. In XP they are always appended to the bottom of the list (unless you set folders to autorefresh like they do in Vista and 7) so that when you for example extract something in your potentially big Downloads folder, you don't have to look for it.
Other: The ability to hold down shift during startup to prevent programs in the Autostart folder from starting was removed. The ability to stay in the start menu when clicking a program while holding down shift was removed, instead it always closes in Vista.
Games: The removal of various functionality has decreased compatability with older games. Dosbox does a pretty fine job for DOS games, but many games written for 9x depend on functionality removed in Vista and thus cannot be run on Vista and or 7. For me personally this is a particularly big problem as I generally play old games more often than new ones and I can't get some of my favorites to run in Windows 7 (in particular Heroes 2-3 with expansions, Hexen 2 with expansion and Heretic 2, they either don't work at all or eventually crash for me in 7).
The 'shutdown' command: I use this command on almost a daily basis on XP. Before I leave my house in the morning or go to bed at night I often start download(s), something I know many others do as well. What I do though, is that I set my computer to shutdown after the download(s) are completed based on the ETA with some margin which works very well. This way my computer doesn't stay on for 7 hours for no reason. On Windows 7 this feature is practically useless for this purpose as the maximum time you can delay the shutdown is 10 minutes.
Explorer: Several features that exist in XP's Explorer were removed in Vista (and therefor don't exist in 7). The Ctrl+Enter hotkey to open the selected folder in a new window, probably the Explorer-specific hotkey that I use the most, was removed. The ability to undo several delete operations was removed. The filename of the file currently being copied, moved or delete when operating on folders was removed. The functionality to view the icons of many old 16-bit games was removed. The ability to preserve permissions when copying files to different drives was removed (of relevance to me is that this breaks backing up environments such as Cygwin and therefor caused me a lot of unexpected problems when I was unaware of this change). Folders are always autorefreshed, which means that you won't know where in the list of files that files that were just moved, copied, or extracted to the folder you have open will appear and thus have to look for them. In XP they are always appended to the bottom of the list (unless you set folders to autorefresh like they do in Vista and 7) so that when you for example extract something in your potentially big Downloads folder, you don't have to look for it.
Other: The ability to hold down shift during startup to prevent programs in the Autostart folder from starting was removed. The ability to stay in the start menu when clicking a program while holding down shift was removed, instead it always closes in Vista.
While I dislike the changes and removal of the features mentioned above, it's no deal breaker for me (even if not being able to play some of my favorite games in particular would be a pretty big loss for when I would occasionally want to play them). I'd definitely use Windows 7 all the time except when playing those old games if the features above were the only thing XP offered that Windows 7 doesn't. But XP offers something else: performance. Performance is in general indeed pretty irrelevant for most people who just want to use their computer, but for a power user it is one of the most important things.
I've read about various performance improvements in Vista and 7. Many parts of the OS have been improved at the low level. Memory is handled better, the NT scheduler does a better job and there's better support for new hardware technology such as Hyperthreading, SSDs and hardware acceleration for graphics. I don't doubt that these things increase the perfomance, but when they are taken out of context they don't mean much. What matters is the performance of the OS in total.
I have two ~3GHz P4 computers with 1GB of RAM and some mid tier graphic cards (from 2004), a 1,6GHz Atom@1,8GHz Netbook with 2GB of RAM (from 2009) and my main computer which has a 2,44GHz C2D @3,6GHz, 4GB RAM and an 8800GTS640MB graphics card (from late 2007). No SSDs except on the netbook. Now, none of this hardware is particularly new, but neither is it ancient. I've had Windows 7 SP1 installed on all of these machines except one of the two from 2004 and the performance has ranged from completely unacceptable to vastly inferior in comparison with XP. To be noted is that I don't play many new games (for starters I don't play games much at all) which sets me apart from a lot of other Windows users who I imagine can draw benefit from the improvements in Windows 7.
I've noticed superior performance in Windows 7 for one thing; copying files, in particular to USB devices. Apart from that, I had ridiculously slower boot and shutdown times on the non-main computers and noticeably slower perfomance when doing virtually anything on them (the 2004 computer would go over to using the page file as soon as Firefox was opened on 7 Ultimate, otherwise basically when Firefox and one more program was opened). Visual Studio was a complete joke to use on the netbook and 2004 computer whereas it worked flawlessly in XP on the 2004 computer and arguably acceptable, although not good, on the netbook. Photoshop was somehow even worse than Visual Studio on the 2004 computer.
But let's forget these arguably underpowered machines and move over to my main computer. While it was a complete nightmare to have Windows 7 on the computer from 2004 and a pretty bad experience on the netbook as well, the same cannot be said for my main computer. It was by any standard acceptable and I had it installed as my main OS for a pretty long period (5-7 months, I don't know exactly). But, with a boot time more than twice that of XP's, Visual Studio starting almost twice as slow and compiling noticably slower and ~0.5GB (of the ~3 of my 4 I use) more memory eaten by the OS I eventually went back.
Can what I'm saying really be true, is XP actually that superior in performance for certain new (according to its own index) hardware? A fact that might be contributing a lot to my results might be that Windows 7 cannot be modified to the extent that XP can. I try to not have anything that I don't have any use of in my installations, something which increases performance a lot. By default my retail XP Professional installs to ~3GB whereas Vista and 7 Ultimate install to ~25GB and ~15GB respectively. A search for "MicroXP" gives you a ready-to-go pretty slimmed installation disc around 100MB in size. When installed I end up with a partition where around 300MB is used after installing my own drivers. This is to compare with Windows 7 where the smallest disc I found was 700MB and installed to 9GB.
The difference in disk space itself isn't important, but it gives an idea of the character of the OS. Windows 7 is a very feature rich OS whereas XP comparatively isn't. The features that Windows 7 provide range from allowing you to be more productive to ensuring your safety and preventing your computer from being taken over. That XP lacks a lot of features in these and other areas makes Windows 7 a better choice for a great majority of users. But not for everyone.
A power user can as opposed to other users want to have as little functionality as possible. This can even include security functionality, as a power user doesn't necessarily need their OS to handle security for them, instead of them handling it themselves before it comes down to the OS. Not through magical super powers, but through ensuring that their computer is running in a safely firewalled environment and that any software that for some reason could be a security thread is run on another computer/OS installation than the one they want to be as fast as possible. The thing is that you are in fact wasting performance for every feature that the OS supplies, and therefore loads and manages, that you aren't using.
For a power user who doesn't care much about the interface changes/additions introduced in Vista/7 (or interface in general), doesn't care much about any of the additions and changes to the Windows API and wants as little features in their OS as possible, the gain in performance when that can be had when using XP is a huge reason to use it. I'm not saying it's the best for all power users as there probably are many who are interested in the interface and usability improvements and want security for one reason or another.
Reasons to use XP on hardware that can also handle Vista and 7: XP offers better backward compatibility with old games and has few (a small number of) hotkeys and interface features absent in Vista and 7. XP is much smaller in size than Vista and 7 can also be slimmed down a lot more than them. The important consequence of this rather than saving disk space is that a performance gain can be had as no performance needs to be wasted for features that are not used.
Reasons to use 7 instead of XP: Mostly summarized in Rydian's post.
This is simply not true at all. Security updates are still sent out every month and support will be available until April the 8th 2014. What "Extended support" means as opposed to "Mainstream support" is that only security updates (so no design or feature updates) are being offered and that technical support, warranty validity etc is limited.
Windows XP security? use a good firewall, a good antivirus, some common sense, and a good browser instead of Internet Explorer.
there you go. most, if not all, the security any XP user needs.
there you go. most, if not all, the security any XP user needs.
Quick relevant question, does anyone have links or at least a proper google search term for the Diet XP rebuild?
I'm actually seriously considering giving it a shot because I'm feeling the OS footprint hurt of a 60GB SSD drive in my laptop with Win7 atm. I already had collected the drivers for everything in it for XP 32-bit a couple years ago. I know that there will be some necessary tweaking for this (XP on SSD) but I've already found information for that much.
I'm actually seriously considering giving it a shot because I'm feeling the OS footprint hurt of a 60GB SSD drive in my laptop with Win7 atm. I already had collected the drivers for everything in it for XP 32-bit a couple years ago. I know that there will be some necessary tweaking for this (XP on SSD) but I've already found information for that much.
Quick relevant question, does anyone have links or at least a proper google search term for the Diet XP rebuild?
I'm actually seriously considering giving it a shot because I'm feeling the OS footprint hurt of a 60GB SSD drive in my laptop with Win7 atm. I already had collected the drivers for everything in it for XP 32-bit a couple years ago. I know that there will be some necessary tweaking for this (XP on SSD) but I've already found information for that much.
depending on your intended usage, a *nix distro would be better than shoehorning SSD support into an ancient OS. and then there's the matter of whether you'll need a 64-bit OS or not. XP 64-bit, as has been stated, blows.
There are many slimmed versions of XP around, are you talking about a specific one? You can easily make your own with nLite, selecting what you want and don't want to remove from your installation. A problem with nLite is however that there are several things it cannot remove, so you'll end up with an installation disc which is considerably larger than some of the premade discs available on torrent sites and elsewhere.
If you don't want to mess around with nLite:
Thank you Mazor! I've looked at nLite before, and I just couldn't rack its name out of my brain. Didn't think I'd ever really want to toy with it myself until recently.
I already have a *X install for my laptop that I run from an 8GB USB stick, but I'm not comfortable enough to make it my primary OS on this laptop (which is from 2007 and has official 32-bit XP drivers available for everything).
But if the XP install works out as I expect, there's probably room to switch it up to dual boot, have all my cake, and eat it, with the Windows 7 "Weight" I'd lose.
I already have a *X install for my laptop that I run from an 8GB USB stick, but I'm not comfortable enough to make it my primary OS on this laptop (which is from 2007 and has official 32-bit XP drivers available for everything).
But if the XP install works out as I expect, there's probably room to switch it up to dual boot, have all my cake, and eat it, with the Windows 7 "Weight" I'd lose.
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The Real Jdbye
*is birb*
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NormalCatelol:
i know that there is a forum for this question but, what would you guys name the switch successor? -
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The Real Jdbye:
don't mind me, just liking all of SDIO's posts, they deserve it for https://gbatemp.net/threads/usb-partition-use-partitioned-usb-hdds-with-the-wii-u.656209/
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