Installing XP on a Vista laptop.

Joeslop

So I have this Acer Aspire 5100-5023 laptop that I bought a little over a year ago. It works fine for most things but gaming (actually, so far the only thing causing a problem is WoW) it just chugs along. Comes with 2 GB of RAM, part of which is given to the video card, and Vista seems to suck it all up because WoW runs at roughly 10 FPS in the easier areas.

So I have a Windows XP OEM CD that I can install from. My question is, will this be a gigantic pain in the ass to do? If I don't have to delete Vista and/or wipe the drives that would be great. Dual-booting surely wouldn't be that bad.

LondonBridge

Can't you just add more RAM?

Dehumanized

I think your GPU might be a significant bottleneck, that moving to XP probably won't fix. To migrate, you will likely need to reformat, or at least get a seperate harddrive unless you have a partition that you could reformat on your existing drive to place XP on.

Joeslop

I think I have room for more RAM which might increase the bottleneck a little bit. Maybe I should try and find an optimization guide for Vista/WoW.

Denada

WoW isn't particularly intensive. Lowering your graphics settings would probably help a lot.

Joeslop

Denada wrote: »

WoW isn't particularly intensive. Lowering your graphics settings would probably help a lot.

Actually, they're at the lowest possible >.>

Wedge83

vista can run wow at decent fps with 2gigs you have to disable Superfetch which is the feature that wastes all your ram in vista, there's one or two other tweaks that can help but Superfetch is the biggest problem, I'll see if I can dig up the guide I used for my laptop.

Edit: I think this was it: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/how-to-disable-superfetch-on-windows-vista/

Locust76

Vista is not your problem, your video chip is. With 2 gigs of ram, your system is capable of running WoW under Vista, but unless you've got a good video chip, you won't see any difference between Vista and XP, save from maybe 2 or 3 fps.

What kind of video chip does your laptop have in it?

deadonthestreet

Wedge83 wrote: »

vista can run wow at decent fps with 2gigs you have to disable Superfetch which is the feature that wastes all your ram in vista, there's one or two other tweaks that can help but Superfetch is the biggest problem, I'll see if I can dig up the guide I used for my laptop.

Edit: I think this was it: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/how-to-disable-superfetch-on-windows-vista/

Superfetch empties out when you actually need the ram for an active program. Disabling it will not give you any performance gains.