anyone still on XP?

I use it on my laptop but XP at home, want to migrate desktop to Win7 but when I next hardware refresh. Not buying another 2GB of older memory JUST for Win7.
 
I used to be in the mindset 'why get W7 when Xp does everything i need?'

DX10 was the main factor for me. It wasn't until i upgraded to W7 that i found neat features that i couldn't do without now.

It's a bit like a mobile phone. Your current phone does everything you want, but that new phone you want does those same things but better.

W7 is very easy to setup a home network and share printers. W7 tends to automatically fix it's own problems (which are pretty rare i must add) That's something that Xp could never do half as good. It also works better on older hardware i found.

I installed W7 on an old Compaq Pentium 4 with a 10gb hdd and 512mb ram. (even though the min requirement is 1Gb) It ran better than xp, so that tells a lot about how much more efficient it is compared to Xp. I didn't insert a single driver cd, it connected to the internet out the box and downloaded all the required drivers without a single problem.

Best thing to do right now is dual boot Xp and W7. Test all your softwarehardware and make the move to W7.
 
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I still use XP

It does everything I need with speed and reliability. Boots extremely fast, plays all of my games, media etc, supports all my hardware, rarely if ever crashes (and this is always when playing a badly coded game like STALKER)

I use an image I made myself with all unnecessary services and features stripped out. I fail to see how these monstrous Win 7 installs could be any faster?? - I don't want anything adding to my OS.

DX10/11 means nothing to me as I still need a new gfx card to max out Crysis in DX9, only then will I see a point in having them
Alleged speed increases mean nothing as a) I frankly don't believe it and b) the only slowdowns I experience are due to using a mechanical hard drive!
Security...well I haven't had a virus since being a silly 14 year old downloading a .exe off Kazaa on Win98, so again, not bothered.
3.5+GB RAM, well I only have 2GB and have yet to find any software that needs more (my XP uses about 280MB, only seen a game go upto 1.1GB)
 
There is only one thing that genuinely annoyed me with win7 (and was better in XP): you can no longer manually arrange/ place files in folders.

Auto-arrange is always on, and you will like it!

Oh and I suppose 13gig for a standard installation when XP was about 2-3gig. That hurts too.

Anyway, I couldn't go back to XP. It looks and feels like a 10 year old OS.
 
Xp is rather old now and win 7 is really good their is no performance loss, probably better im guessing. Only issue i had was creative audigy 2 zs driver and software but i found some guy was updating them in his own time and creative nearly shut him down but due to public they allow it now. So thats sorted now as before the speakers wernt being used properly but now they are etc.
 
Dual Booting Tiny 7 and Tiny XP. Not exactly standard or microsoft approved versions but removes all the bloat of standard install making it much more efficient :) Using my license keys from my original systems with them and microsoft checks seem happy with that.

Reason why is:
Clean XP install (no store pc full of bloatware) 2-3Gb windows folder, ~200-300mb ram useage
tiny xp install ~500mb windows folder, ~80mb ram useage

can get a more stripped out version with 50mb ram footprint but u start losing key functionality so i went for full function version.

Clean Windows 7 install 12-13Gb windows folder, ~1-1.2GB ram usage
Tiny 7 install 3GB windows folder, ~200mb ram usage

These tiny versions are really quick you wont want to go back to the full microsoft versions after using them. I havent had any compatability issues with either tiny 7 or tinyxp over the past few years. Anyway only reason i still have XP is cause im so used to it and i still like to do work in it when i want as much ram available.
 
StephenLawUK said:
Clean Windows 7 install 12-13Gb windows folder, ~1-1.2GB ram usage
Tiny 7 install 3GB windows folder, ~200mb ram usage
Click to expand...

You realise that the high RAM-usage in Win7 is actually just pre-fetch, commonly used apps are prefetched into RAM, and cleared out if the RAM is needed. This means that the low RAM usage in Tiny7 is actually worse than the high RAM usage in default Win7.
 
uv said:
You realise that the high RAM-usage in Win7 is actually just pre-fetch, commonly used apps are prefetched into RAM, and cleared out if the RAM is needed. This means that the low RAM usage in Tiny7 is actually worse than the high RAM usage in default Win7.
Click to expand...

I always thought it was funny that MS brought prefetch back in
I can still remember the Olde days when you configured prefetch
for your commonly used Apps in windows 3.11 ......
 
lurkio said:
I always thought it was funny that MS brought prefetch back in
I can still remember the Olde days when you configured prefetch
for your commonly used Apps in windows 3.11 ......
Click to expand...

Different sort of pre-fetch isn't it. XP also has a form of pre-fetch.

Personally I'll decide what apps to load into RAM and when thank you, not Windows. With SSD it is increasingly redundant anyway. Having my hard drive grinding away because Windows decides it needs to do 'something' gets on my nerves.
 
dirtydog said:
Different sort of pre-fetch isn't it. XP also has a form of pre-fetch.

Personally I'll decide what apps to load into RAM and when thank you, not Windows. With SSD it is increasingly redundant anyway. Having my hard drive grinding away because Windows decides it needs to do 'something' gets on my nerves.
Click to expand...

Sigh. It loads them based on what you use when you switch on the computer. If you need the RAM then Windows frees it. Having unused RAM is just a waste and actually gives you no benefit. So if you turn on your PC and open Outlook everyday then Windows will cache it so when you get around to opening Outlook its already in memory and it opens faster.

Seriously with Windows 7 there's no need to try and optomise anything. There's no 'massive gains' to be had by turning superfetch off.


M.
 
m4cc45 said:
Sigh. It loads them based on what you use when you switch on the computer. If you need the RAM then Windows frees it. Having unused RAM is just a waste and actually gives you no benefit. So if you turn on your PC and open Outlook everyday then Windows will cache it so when you get around to opening Outlook its already in memory and it opens faster.

Seriously with Windows 7 there's no need to try and optomise anything. There's no 'massive gains' to be had by turning superfetch off.


M.
Click to expand...

Sigh.

I didn't say I cared about how much RAM I have free.

I care about unnecessary hard drive usage.

I don't want Windows to try and guess what I want open and then load it up. Maybe I do usually load such and such, but maybe today I want to load something else - I don't want Windows to second guess me.

If I want to load Outlook? I click on it, it loads in a blink of an eye, I have SSD.

It is smoke and mirrors - Windows 7 and Vista cannot load apps any quicker than XP does because they can't spin your hard drive faster. There are of course a few small system tray apps I load automatically every time I start Windows and they all load in a combined time of about one second, and again superfetch is not needed.
 
Still using XP here and will continue until it's no longer supported, I read somewhere that games are far from optimised yet for DX11, so as long as XP works I see no need to spend money on a new OS, more memory to run Aero, and a DX11 card.
 
I'm still using XP as a dual boot, purely for playing Fallout New Vegas as it doesn't appear to like my install of Windows 7 Ultimate.
 
I thought I had a hardware issue with my system so installed XP onto a spare hard drive. I can't for the life of me get Bioshock to run on Windows 7 at all. But it will in XP.
 
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