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De-Vista-ing
SlickShughes
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
How do it do it? I need to free my wife's laptop from the clutches of Vista, as she's dissappointed with its performance and has chosen the OS as the cause, mainly thanks to those cutsey Mac commercials. She may well be right, the thing has better specs than my desktop but runs at less than half what the PC does. I'm fairly tech savvy, but I've never removed an OS before. Do I just go out and buy XP? Can I even do that anymore? Will I have to reformat? Is there some mystery set of Vista settings I can use to make it not suck? Any help appreciated.
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The magical setting to make Vista not suck is not a setting at all. It's a metric shitload of RAM. I would say that 2 gigs is a comfortable minimum for Vista.
And if she's only been using Vista for a few days it's still making the precache settings so it will significantly speed up in a week or so.
I should add then that the Vista laptop runs worse than my tablet running XP from when I graduated uni in 2004.
She's had it for about a year now. I'm only finally looking into switching to XP as now she's hinting at wanting a macbook now.
Thanatos, you're a good guy and all.
But that's one of the dumbest fucking things I've ever read. Yes, you can't compare desktop specs to laptop specs straight across, but laptops aren't slower because they're laptops. They're slower because, well, they're slower. The laptop I'm currently typing on probably blows the balls off the desktops of half the registered users here. But my desktop is more powerful than this laptop. It has nothing to do with the fact that it's a laptop or a desktop, but the specifics of the laptop or desktop it self.
Anyways, as Khavall said, check the crapware on the the laptop first before you wipe it out. It could also be you don't have enough ram to run Vista smoothly (generally 2gb is minimum, 3+ is recommended). Has she been complaining about the speed for the entire year?
I'm not blaming you, I'm blaming the stupid computer manufacturers for selling laptops/desktops with Vista and 1gb of RAM. Utterly retarded in my mind.
But yes, to undo Vista, you have to format the HDD to really guarantee that it's gone.
Once you've secured a copy, you should:
1) Back up her important files.
2) Make a list of the programs she'll want installed after the switch.
3) Make sure you have drivers for the laptop's hardware. (XP versions, of course)
4) Reformat and install XP.
5) Install drivers.
6) Install software.
7) Copy her files to their appropriate locations.
Obviously, if you're comparing a 20-year-old desktop to a modern laptop, the modern laptop is going to blow it out of the water.
Yeah see I made the mistake of asking someone to consider Ubuntu in the Tavern. Not worth bringing up.
That being said, the way OSes are set up by default is to stick everything in one big partition. Best way to go about it is to make two partitions - a 10 - 20GB one for the OS itself, and the rest of the hard drive to store absolutely all of your data. That way you can play around with installing different operating systems at will. You can do it in the XP installer, but keep in mind that you'll also have to backup your data somehow before you set up your partitions as such.
The drive is partitioned, with just over 8 gb set aside as a "backup" drive. I could reformat that and install XP on there, yes?
Also, Ive had fantastically shitty results in trying to install XP on a machine that was never shipped with XP, there's always several devices that don't have drivers.
If I were you I'd give Vista SP1 a shot, it worked for me and I was a total Vista hater up til a week or two ago.
But again, what are the specs of this laptop? The specs could very well be fine for Vista and the system could be bogged down with shit.
Specs:
AMD Turion 64 1.8 GHz
2 GB ram
It's only running Vista 32, would upgrading to Vista 64 fix anything? I doubt it's bogged down with much, we're careful about what we install.
This may be a problem. Some of the newer laptops may not even have XP drivers for some stuff. If XP is an option for your laptop model, you should be fine, but don't assume XP drivers exist anymore for laptop hardware. It's probably fine, but check first.
That would be this article. It's a good read.