Simple HardDrive/OS questions

retrofly

retrofly

retrofly

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Joined
2 Nov 2007
Posts
49
Hi
I currently have vista 64bit installed, but want to start running XP as it sounds like you can gain quite a performance boost when running games.

Q1: Can I whip out my old HD, put a new one in and install XP, then have both hot swappable when I want to use one or the other. (I've looked at dual booting but seems like more hassle :D)

Q2: Will i gain more performance going to 32bit XP or 64bit XP?

Thanks

Luke
 
do not get xp 64 bit, driver support is terrible

you can swap drives no problem, what I would do in your shoes is remove vista hdd put in spare hdd, install xp, reconnect vista hdd, then use bios to setlect which to boot from, no need to swap drives

as an alternative to changing hdd boot order in vista, you could edit the vista bootloader to offer you an option to load xp

and I would only expect a few percent gain, ie less then 10, it depends on how powerful your system is
 
I put HL2 on my machine over the weekend, initially on Vista then on XP.

On Vista the level load times were into the minutes, on XP it was around 8 seconds. This is on a 3ghz 2180 with 2 gig of RAM.
 
Hi
Its for Arma 2. It seems you can get up to 30% gains by using XP, and I'm getting terrible performance using my current setup.

Intel Core 2 Duo E2180 "LGA775 Conroe" 2.00GHz (800FSB) - Retail
Antec Titan 650 Tower Case - 650w TruePower PSU
Abit IP35-E (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard
Samsung SpinPoint S 250GB SATA-II 8MB Cache - OEM (HD250HJ)
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium 64-Bit Edition DVD - OEM - 1Pk
6GB (2x1GB || 2x2GB) PC2-6400C4 800MHz Ultra Low Latency DDR2 Dual Channel Kit
BFG GeForce GTX 260 OCX MAXCORE 896MB GDDR3 TV-OutDual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (BFGEGTX260MC8960CXE)

Basically I'm using th Arma MarkII to bench-mark my system (Its for games so I feel its best to use a game test :D)

My Arma 2 score is about 1300 with my stock settings. People with similar systems are getting 3000.

I've got an old HD and copy of XP knocking about, so it'll be good to see the difference.

Cheers

Luke
 
Download win7, if it's still around, and give that a go too. Faster than Vista.

dl763, the reason you saw such an improvement is most likely because of your lack of RAM. 2GB is plenty for XP but frequently not enough for memory-intensive apps on Vista.
 
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