Should I?? And how if I do??

[Radix]

Hey all,

Kind of a noob question, I only ask it because of all the negative crap I've been hearing about Vista. I bought a new pc about 3 weeks ago and it came pre-loaded with Vista. Having used it for 3 weeks has allowed me to get a pretty good feel for it and pretty much allowed me to formulate an opinion of it. Which is.. well I like it, it looks nice, seems to work half decent for what I do, and does have some interesting features. However, there are the cons such as it's insane hogging of the system resources and always using a huge fraction of the ram installed. But all things aside I guess I'm basically asking should I switch back to XP or just tough it out. I don't do any extremely demanding tasks and have no real reason to warrant using Vista besides the fact that it's a new OS... which really isn't a huge factor, and yes i probably have answered my own question somewhere along the line but I'm curious as to what you all think.

Now, if I was to switch back to XP, and here's the noob question, lol would I just do a straight boot up from the XP install disc and proceed with a format and then install as per usual or is there some crazy bullsh*t that I need to do first?

I only ask because my current system is using a 160GB SATA 3gb/s HD and I don't have much experience dealing with RAID. If I switch back to XP will I need to set up the RAID again or can I just do a straight format and install of XP?

Thanks in advance for your help!

-Radix

 

[joke]

This is probably a better question to ask in the XP forums but... I'd first see if your XP disk has native support for your raid environment. If it doesn't have native support you will need to get the 'f6' (or it may be 'f5) floppy first. Get it from whomever your raid support comes from and when XP is starting to load - press f6 so it will ask for any additional drivers. If you are using an Intel ichx southbridge you will need the intel drivers as I know they are not on any XP image at this time.

One easy way to find out (if you don't already know about your chipset support) is to just boot the xp disk and just go for installation. It will either work or you won't get a good setup (probably just with your raid setup).

I recommend that if you don't like Vista, back off until you can't get any more support for XP (i.e. you are forced to make a switch). At that time you can just switchover to linux.

good luck in the XP forums - bye.

 

[pkellmey]

This is the new OS that the PCs are going to so I am uncertain why you would revert if you have not actually found something wrong yet, especially knowing that you will have to reinstall later. So, have you actually received any memory issues? Are you trying to compare resources to something else? It sounds like you may be comparing straight RAM % usage without understanding where the other percentage is going to. The system may not be actually using all those resources, only allocating it - that may be where the confusion is.

 

[desolationw]

When i booted Vista, i had 700mb of 1gb used.

Disabled Aero Interface, 400mb of 1gb used.

 

[joke]

When i booted Vista, i had 700mb of 1gb used.

Disabled Aero Interface, 400mb of 1gb used.

That's a good point but to futher your quest, I think you would be better off going all the way back to Windows 3.1. There are several real advantages (very similar to the linux argument): no more virus or security issues; it is really fast; and you would have 999mb free!

 

[pkellmey]

Exactly, many of the RAM issues have more to do with those newer services that allocate RAM for faster pre-fetch, performance, whatever. If you actually are getting memory issues saying you have lack of memory, that's one thing, but if you actually just want as much free RAM as you can get, DOS is best.