Originally Posted by Ownaginatios

Yup, as of March 31st 2003 it got omnomnomnomed by Fedora.

my bad.. i thought you would understand what i meant by Red Hat.. it wouldnt make sense to tell everyone to get a discontinued distribution... i meant Red Hat Enterprise Linux and more specifically the compiled version that goes by the name of Cent OS.. im sure no one here wants to buy RHEL just for the support..

and its true that this is meant to be a server.. but if you dont want a server, i would assume you want something user-friendly.. then you should just stick to XP..

Just generally speaking, if your laptop is capable of running vista (2GB+ ram and a decent processor), it's more of a pain to downgrade than the benefits are worth. Vista SP1 with aero turned off runs just about as well as XP in almost every way at this point, vista has more of a bad rep than anything else.

What you really need to ask yourself is why exactly don't you like vista? and can I fix this by just changing some settings?

If you can fix most of your problems by just changing a few settings then downgrading isn't worth it. and you also have to remember that a lot of manufacturers don't make XP drivers anymore.

People have actually stopped making XP drivers? Considering how many people use XP and the bad reputation Vista has, that has to be the dumbest decision you could make. Microsoft wanting to discontinue its support for it is one thing, we EXPECT them to make stupid decisions, because they will still make metric ****tons of money. Not necessarily the case for other companies.

Originally Posted by Tailsnake

If you can fix most of your problems by just changing a few settings then downgrading isn't worth it. and you also have to remember that a lot of manufacturers don't make XP drivers anymore.

But reformating from scratch is a great thing to do, specially with Retail purchased computers, they come with sooo much junk. Its a great way to speed up the operation of your pc.

Originally Posted by kevinf

But reformating from scratch is a great thing to do, specially with Retail purchased computers, they come with sooo much junk. Its a great way to speed up the operation of your pc.

If you uninstall/disable what you don't want then the speed boost that you get from reformatting is marginal at best. I generally don't see reformatting as a viable option to speedup a computer unless you've been surfing/downloading without protection for some time or if you've had your PC for quite some time and it's started to slow down as a result of file fragments, residual files, and partially uninstalled/installed drivers and or programs.

My laptop isn't insane but even running vista and with some stock software still installed it's perfectly capable of running games like UT3 and COD4, and the improvement I'd get from reformatting and installing XP would give me less than a 5 FPS improvement in either of those games and the improvement in processing normal task would be almost unnoticeable unless I actually went out of my way to time them. On top of that I'd also run the risk of losing compatibility with some of my hardware to to driver issues.

Generally speaking if you can get a computer pre-installed with XP, go for it. But if you have vista pre-installed it's generally not worth the effort to downgrade to XP.

I can't say that I've heard of manufacturers not making XP drivers any more. They'll be making them for a while, you still have NT and 98 in some cases.

As for the speeding up of the system, disabling unnecessary services is a great way to do that. www.blackviper.com has tutorials and lists of services you can disable. I thirded (that's right thirded) my boot time in XP using his tips.

Originally Posted by DannyV

I can't say that I've heard of manufacturers not making XP drivers any more. They'll be making them for a while, you still have NT and 98 in some cases.

Nope, it's true. Pretty much all HP computers that have come out this year do not offer XP drivers. There are ways to "hack" some of them on, but it's too difficult for most users. It pissed me right off when I bought my tx2500...

Well that's HP, but are we talking about laptop manufacturers or actual hardware manufacturers

Originally Posted by DannyV

Well that's HP, but are we talking about laptop manufacturers or actual hardware manufacturers

Well, you will be able to find some of the drivers for XP (i.e. GPU drivers, CPU scaling, .etc) but all the fancy crap like touch buttons - stuff proprietary to that specific laptop - probably won't have drivers, at least, not without some über hax.

Making a "vista only" laptop run XP is definitely not a task you want to be doing if you don't know much about computers.

Anyone who wants to put XP on should probably just live with Vista. Chances are that you'll be missing drivers that support things like CPU scaling, causing you to actually end up with less battery life than normal.

Originally Posted by Ownaginatios

Anyone who wants to put XP on should probably just live with Vista. Chances are that you'll be missing drivers that support things like CPU scaling, causing you to actually end up with less battery life than normal.

I would like to take this time to mention a few great FREE programs.

http://www.diefer.de/speedswitchxp/ it does CPU scalling using small system tray app, has profiles for different power settings, can control screen timeout, hd powerdown, etc, as well. I have it set to full cpu power on power supply, and when on battery, i use the dynamically scalling (adjusts power as needed) or Max Battery options.

the built in windows battery monitor works the best, as hovering over it displays the actual time remaining, and it can warn you / turn off pc, etc. when low.

Wireless / GPU / Touchpad drivers are still being made for XP for almost all laptops. Most laptops have synaptics touchpads, and any generic synaptics driver should work for enhanced scrolling, etc.

GPU: http://downloads.guru3d.com/ generic ATI Catalyst and Nvidia control panels, and other handy utilities (like overclocking).

Oh, if you have those fancy multimedia keys / extra keyboard buttons http://www.autohotkey.com/ is a great program to customize them to your wildest dreams.

the Fn+ button ALWAYS work, its built into the hardware

Hope that helps.
-Kevin

ps. I have a program for everything, i have installed and tested hundreds of programs in the past 8 years, in fact im in the process of making a webpage with a list of my favourites. So yes, re-formating is sometimes handy