Will Downgrading Windows Increase DAW Performance?

So I got this laptop a few years back, when MS was pushing Vista really hard. It has Vista pre-installed, 2gb of ram, and a fairly decent processor (AMD Turion 64 x2).

I've stuck with it for a while, but I feel like I'd be getting more out of the laptop if I reformatted and switched to XP. Even though there's 2gb of ram, I vaguely remember reading somewhere that 1gb of that is taken up by the operating system itself. Switching to an OS that's far less of a memory/CPU hog would greatly increase the performance of the DAW, wouldn't it?

This makes sense to me, but I wanted to throw it up here to see if any of the more technical-minded heads here would agree before I go reformatting and wiping everything out.

I'd say yeah that laptop is kind of low on the specs side of things for vista or win7, but all you really need to do is add another couple gigs of RAM and you'll be set... wouldn't bother downgrading to xp really...if anything i'd actually upgrade to win7 (after you stick some more RAM in there...)

Taking this thing apart, installing more ram, and not breaking it is beyond my field of expertise.

yeah try Windows 7, it should run better with older hardware then Vista, since it was also made to accomodate netbooks/lowspec hardware.

try xp, what can you lose, its fast as fuck, and doesn't need too much ram, I would say go for it.

Don't got to Windows 7 when you only have 2 gigs of hardware, "Downgrade" to XP, I still use XP for my music machine because it's really fast, intuitive to nativigate and stable for 32bit software. The only reason I would got WIndows 7 is to be able to use more than 3 gigs of ram. I don't hate Windows 7 I know it pretty well actually but I know XP like the back of my hand, can do anything with it really fast and using W7 always has me going I MISS XP.

XP all the way

It's settled, then. Now to backup 100 gigs of raw audio...

so yeah, down grading from vista to XP is significantly harder than just sticking in a XP disk and clicking go..

Just my opinion, but before you do anything, make sure you can track down all the appropriate drivers for all components that need them. GFX card, chipset, wireless, all of it basically..

Windows XP install does not include sata drivers, so you'd probably get stuck before even installation has begun. Most likely you would need to find the proper sata drivers and either slipstream them into a new XP install cd, or put em on a floppy disk and add them manually during the XP installation.

Finding graphics card drivers can be a proper bitch sometimes, depends on the card of course. if its pretty new there is a good chance there wouldn't be such a thing as a manufactures XP driver pack for it. You would have to rely on force ware in that scenario. It's a mixed bag..

if you really wanna stick XP on there and potentially burn away a shit load of time, it would indeed increase system performance over Vista. honestly though, go for windows 7... You'll have no problems finding all the drivers you need and will be so much easier than trying to force XP on there, will also improve system performance over Vista.

maybe check the laptop manufacturers website, often they will supply driver and utilities packs for users wishing to upgrade or repair their systems... Especially for systems that came with Vista installed

yeah that is very true. my laptop which came with Vista had this SATA problem. All the drivers were easily downloaded though... probably depends on what brand.. stock Toshiba Satellite was a peace of cake for me.

had a pretty sweet USB XP install stick in the end, which made it very easy to slipstream all sorts of stuff in there.. don't exactly remember how I made it, but I also used nLite on it which is a great program for tweaking your install disk.

I have a XP recovery CD and everytime a family member/friend asks me to fix their computer i downgrade their OS to XP (they get mad at first because it doesn't look pretty like Win7, but when they see the difference in speed, etc i get lots of thanks and money)

  On 2/6/2012 at 1:52 AM, YO303 said:

everytime a family member/friend asks me to fix their computer i downgrade their OS to XP

lol

Slipping in the SATA drivers into the XP boot disk isn't hard... Or you could tohrrrreeennntttt an SP3 version with auto activate and SATA drivers

  On 2/6/2012 at 8:06 PM, Blanket Fort Collapse said:

Slipping in the SATA drivers into the XP boot disk isn't hard... Or you could tohrrrreeennntttt an SP3 version with auto activate and SATA drivers

yeah to be fair it's not so hard to do, but I have had mixed results. sometimes it just wasn't loving it.

had to get some emergency laptop fixage when I was in the states last year. catastrophic hard drive failure in Calagary. next day I was off to Portland. Took my lapto to a shop there to get a new HD, and hopefully blag a copy of XP to stick on my machine. The guy in the shop had some kinda super awesome XP install disk with presumably ever driver known to mankind slipstreamed into the fucker. Stuck that in the disk drive and whooop, sorted! No need for hunting down crappy force ware NVidea drivers and obscure wireless adapter gubbins. Only bitch was he didn't give me the registration code or anything, so a while later I got stuck with XP not thinking its genuine and refusing to let me in. still, got me through the rest of my trip..

My god, how I wanted that disk, I would have paid handsomely for it!

I did try scouring the Internet for a similar installer, never found one but I suck and finding wares of anything =/

  On 2/7/2012 at 3:52 PM, TechDiff said:

Only bitch was he didn't give me the registration code or anything, so a while later I got stuck with XP not thinking its genuine and refusing to let me in.

it wouldn't have mattered whether he gave you the CD key that he had or not - if XP was spitting out that it wasn't genuine, it means that they key he had used had been blacklisted. You would've had to find another CD key that hadn't been written off. My guess is that install of XP would've been some corporate edition, and it's hard to get hold of keys that aren't blacklisted.

I've used a lot of different versions of arr matey Win XP and never ever (yet, knock on wood) had it tell me my copies weren't genuine & out of the dozens and dozens of my friends and my own machines, I only had real difficulty get drivers for one Toshiba laptop and one Acer desktop... even then it only took a few hours to track down drivers that worked.

The only machines I will install XP on now is my music rigs and I don't put them on the internet anyway.