For all those that say they hate Vista - run XP at the same time

[Zuts]

Hi,

I dont know where all this information is coming from. Any laptop that has a BIOS can run XP.

In fact if you look at the machines being offered by DELL, HP, ASUS etc they are all available with XP as a downgrade option.

Apple Macs dont have a BIOS, they have EFI which is a type of firmware. This is probably a good thing as the BIOS has been with us since the time of the original IBM XT. Vista supports EFI, XP doesnt. Eventually no laptops will be built with BIOS they will all have EFI, currently very few Wintel machines have this.

In any case it is always possible to run a virtual machine. This is the preffered way as Intel includes virtualisation hardware on all new Core 2 CPU's.

Cheers
Paul

[dugnsuz (Doug)]

Cheers Paul
Vista must go!
It makes me want to punch my monitor - not a good thing!

[Omaroo (Chris Malikoff)]

You're probably still OK Doug. From what I've found out, this only applies to some manufacturers lower-end machines coming off the production in very recent times. It'd be nice to know what machines are capable of backgrading to XP if you want.

[Omaroo (Chris Malikoff)]

You're mostly right Paul, of course, but there are machines coming out soon with minor hardware upgrades to some internal peripherals (sound hardware and video mainly) which will not have drivers available for them under XP - ever. You MUST run Vista to drive them. Doesn't mean they won't run - but they'll run "hobbled" in some way.

An example is the Fujitsu tablet PC my business partner just purchased. I back-dated it to XP and then there was no sound, and the stylus didn't support variable pressure any more. I put Vista back on and presto - it all works again.

Originally Posted by Zuts

Hi,

I dont know where all this information is coming from. Any laptop that has a BIOS can run XP.

In fact if you look at the machines being offered by DELL, HP, ASUS etc they are all available with XP as a downgrade option.

Apple Macs dont have a BIOS, they have EFI which is a type of firmware. This is probably a good thing as the BIOS has been with us since the time of the original IBM XT. Vista supports EFI, XP doesnt. Eventually no laptops will be built with BIOS they will all have EFI, currently very few Wintel machines have this.

In any case it is always possible to run a virtual machine. This is the preffered way as Intel includes virtualisation hardware on all new Core 2 CPU's.

Cheers
Paul

[allan gould]

Well finally took the plunge and purged Vista, XP and the lot. I'm happily running Ubantu 8.04 and I doubt I'll go back.
Regards, Allan

[DJDD]

Originally Posted by allan gould

Well finally took the plunge and purged Vista, XP and the lot. I'm happily running Ubantu 8.04 and I doubt I'll go back.
Regards, Allan

if only linux/mac would run BF2142, TF2 and other graphics intensive games...

the VMWare option is the best one and teh performance hit is not that big, really.

[Tandum (Robin)]

It's not strickly correct that some machines are vista only. New machines use AHCI to talk to hard drives and this is an additional driver in xp, not native, so you'd need a floppy disk with the drivers and a floppy drive to read it when you install. You may be able to change it from AHCI to IDE in bios, depends on the machine, but AHCI is faster. I have not seen one which you couldn't change.

[Omaroo (Chris Malikoff)]

Originally Posted by Tandum

It's not strickly correct that some machines are vista only. New machines use AHCI to talk to hard drives and this is an additional driver in xp, not native, so you'd need a floppy disk with the drivers and a floppy drive to read it when you install. You may be able to change it from AHCI to IDE in bios, depends on the machine, but AHCI is faster. I have not seen one which you couldn't change.

The machines will all run - but some peripherals are now being released that won't support XP any more - read a few posts back.

[tornado33]

Thanks for letting us know about this Chris. I will soon be using a Vista 64 bit machine I plan to build soon. It has to be Vista 64 because I will be using more then 4gb ram. 32 bit O/S's can only use about 3.5gb of ram, so for the odd thing that might not run under Vista64 Id be happy to run XP as well.
Scott

[Omaroo (Chris Malikoff)]

Originally Posted by tornado33

Thanks for letting us know about this Chris. I will soon be using a Vista 64 bit machine I plan to build soon. It has to be Vista 64 because I will be using more then 4gb ram. 32 bit O/S's can only use about 3.5gb of ram, so for the odd thing that might not run under Vista64 Id be happy to run XP as well.
Scott

Another very valid use for it Scott. Let us know how you go!

[mojo (Terry)]

Originally Posted by Omaroo

I have just downloaded Sun's "VirtualBox" - a FREE virtual host application which allows you to run any Intel-specific operating system on your machine alongside Vista....

It is very good! I stumbled across VirtualBox after I installed VMWare and it crashed on installation. I've used VMWare before and it is great but crashing while it was installing itself was a bit much to take

The VirtualBox open source version comes packaged with many Linux distributions but has no USB support. Sun's does. I used Sun's version to reverse engineer a USB Windows driver a while back and it's perfect. USB works totally transparently as far as the guest operating system is concerned. Streams video in the Windows guest on a Linux host without a problem. Surprisingly good.

[tornado33]

Just to try it out I installed it on my laptop and then used it to install a 2nd XP on it, easy to set up and use. I have the 2nd XP installed and running, each is sharing the 2 gb ram with 1 gb each
Scott

[Omaroo (Chris Malikoff)]

Originally Posted by tornado33

Just to try it out I installed it on my laptop and then used it to install a 2nd XP on it, easy to set up and use. I have the 2nd XP installed and running, each is sharing the 2 gb ram with 1 gb each
Scott

Good stuff Scott! How are you finding relative performance? I almost couldn't tell that a secondary system was running! The machine just churned away at its normal speed as usual.

[Satchmo]

My only comment , having just installed Vista Premium for a Media Center PC is that it is a memory hog. The PC with 1gb memory is running very sluggishly indeed. If I had a larger hard disc I would now have considered a dual boot machine...

Media Center is something of a disapointment. It doesn't record or dislpay video in HD and there is no free Australian program guide to make recording schedualing easy. The crappy VCR program that came with my HD Tuner card is starting to look pretty nifty

[monoxide]

Originally Posted by Omaroo

LOL! Not a silly idea AT ALL. Allan - what you fail to realise is that many machines coming off the production line now CANNOT run XP natively. They are BUILT to run Vista and that's it.

i have to disagree, those 'built for vista' stickers and the like you see are just marketing which is supposed to make the average person think its a better system, you could run whatever you like on it if you do a clean install.
but yeh, those stickers and hype are just to let you know that particular system is 100% compatible with vista as it WILL not run on some hardware, i had to update my bios on my old mainboard as the installer kept crashing for example.

first thing i did when i got my 'built for vista' laptop was get rid of it and put xp on.

unless of course you buy some heap of junk that wont let you in the bios or boot from cd but i havent seen anything like that for years now (the old compaq's)

dont believe for a second that you HAVE to run vista because you dont.
those issues you mention are probably caused by missing drivers which can be found on the manufacturers website and if it works with vista, it will definately work with xp

[Omaroo (Chris Malikoff)]

Originally Posted by monoxide

dont believe for a second that you HAVE to run vista because you dont.
those issues you mention are probably caused by missing drivers which can be found on the manufacturers website and if it works with vista, it will definately work with xp

Our tablet PC has a couple of internal devices that are not supported by XP as I stated earlier. As menial as they are (tablet pens pressure control and sound) they did not work under XP and we could not find drivers for them. Admittedly, this is an exception to the rule still.

Hey all - I get the feeling that I'm being attacked here. All I wanted to do was provide an alternative to those that might want to run XP under Vista if that's easier than blowing a whole machine away. I run Vista and have NO problems, so I really don't care if anyone else does. You guys make it very difficult to post anything on this forum without being blasted for it.

Sorry I tried to help.

[Barrykgerdes]

Hi

I believe that it is quite probable that many new lap tops may only run under Vista or a similarly structured operating system. The current trend with laptops is to make them smaller, thinner, lighter and longer battery life from smaller batteries. To do this they may need new hardware concepts that are not provided for in the BIOS or BIOS extensions of the common operating systems. Even so I also believe that the differences can be copmpensated for with software. After all BIOS has not supplied all needs for years and all operating systems have some form of BIOS extension in their operating systems. Vista probably has more BIOS extensions to take care of hardware changes.

In any case you can always do what I have done and make a self booting DOS 7 CD with all the utiliies you need to examine the computer. If this disk boots in the computer and looks at all the periferals you have. I would expect that any other OS will also work.

Barry

PS I still hate Vista but I will leave it on my laptop for testing purposes and it is the only computer I have that will run the WWT.

B.

[monoxide]

as long as you can boot from cd you can run whatever you like be it linux or another version of windows.

if you have any doubts try downloading a linux 'live' cd and throw it in the drive, it should boot straight into linux running off the cd

unless there is a microsoft brand computer or laptop out there id highly doubt anything will become 'vista only' but in the future it will be a good idea to run vista as thats the way everything will be moving compatibility wise

basically anything hardware related is done through drivers, the operating system cant really talk directly to the hardware, think of it as the operating system and the hardware speaking different languages, the driver is just there to be a translator to tell the two how to talk to eachother, its just up to the manufacturer how many 'languages' they want their hardware to speak.

[allan gould]

According to the latest APC, Microsoft is facing a large antitrust case for all that "Windows Vista capable" and "Certified for Windows Vista" promos that were carried out in the States in helping Intel get rid of its chips in underpower4ed machine. Now what chip manufacturer is making their chips so that it will now only run Vista.
Talk about oligo-opolies.
When are these smart alecs in their ivory towers going to realise that the customer will baulk at what they are doing and go elsewhere?
You can read more on this issue at www.tinyurl.com/233p6w.
Interesting.

[Tandum (Robin)]

Originally Posted by Omaroo

The machines will all run - but some peripherals are now being released that won't support XP any more - read a few posts back.

Not true. You just don't have the correct drivers installed or the drivers don't operate the same in the different systems. Media Center in XP operates differently to Media Center in Vista for example. In vista the volume control on the remote works on any motherboard, in XP, on the same motherboard, is doesn't. This is a driver issue, vista has the newer drivers.

XP is still a fully supported operating system, it's vista that isn't fully supported. Especially 64bit Vista, which is what we need to support huge amounts of ram to process those pictures. iTunes only released a Vista 64 package last month for example, yet it's been here for nearly 2 years.

Each operating system has it's place and it's obvious when you have the wrong operating system doing the wrong thing.