Vista performance on Athlon XP

[onlyCOpunk]

Sorry if this is a repeat. I've searched the forums, google, and fansites regarding and haven't been able to find any straightforward answers from firsthand experiences. Only the arrogant answers from teenagers with new Dells.

My computer is only I know AthlonXP 2600 1gig of ram and an x1950gt, so I don't need any comments about how old my system is.

It's come the time for me to format. It's been about 3 years on this machine because my new video card is having problems being installed over the old one. My question is, do I take the lunge into Vista HP? I'm somewhat tempted just to see what it's like and to do some good fashioned troubleshooting. But I don't want to get into a the vicious and obsessive cycle of "I have to upgrade" because I usually make hasty decisions that end up costing me more in the end, like buying more ram from Office Depot at MSRP.

I'm not planning to upgrade my system for about another 6 months, so replies of the "get this xxxxx" wont work. I'm just looking for first hand experience with Vista on a system similar to this. I have an nForce 2 motherboard that was mint back in the day, but now I guess is supposed to be hit or miss with Vista. But I suppose if it doesn't work, I could jsut wipe the HD clean again and put Vista away until a new system is born.

 

[stevty2889]

It depends on what you are doing with your computer. If you do any gaming..stick with XP. Gaming performance is slower in Vista. Vista is also a RAM hog, so 1 gig isn't really gonna cut it for gaming either. Vista is much more resource intensive than XP, so if I were you I would hold off until you are upgraded. Not that vista doesn't have it's advantages, it's more secure, I like the interface, with enough RAM it's very responsive.

 

[soonerproud]

With your system configuration, I would not even attempt to use Vista. The nforce2 and nforce3 chipsets are not even supported by Nvidia on Vista. You are looking at some serious headaches alone just for that reason. Then you add to the factor you are using an older single core processor with only 1 gig of RAM in a gaming machine.

Vista alone without Anti-Virus or video drivers uses between 400-500 megs of RAM. Vista also has a lot of new services and processes running in the background that will spike your idle cpu usage on older single core processors. It is almost universal advice to not even try Vista on a single core processor. (Except for Microsoft of course.)

You are much better off sticking with 2000 or XP on an older system like that. If you get the Vista itch, just go to the local electronics store and play with one of their displays to scratch it a little until you are ready to build a new Vista computer.

 

[Peter]

Performance issues mostly are two things: Lack of RAM, and the poor speed of old hard disks.

Compatibility issues are mostly lack of drivers - chipsets are not an issue, but I/O components integrated into chipsets are, just as much as discrete stuff on mainboards is.

So, check driver availability for everything you'll be using, and if that's all good, go ahead.

 

[SynthDude2001]

I briefly ran Vista (may have been one of the late RC's) about 10 months ago on an Athlon XP 1900+ (also had 1GB of RAM at the time), and it was pretty slow. Particularly in games (and nothing new either - the original Unreal Tournament), they stuttered badly. In retrospect I might have been able to get away with it by setting the game's process priority to High (which I even still have to do on my single core A64).

I'm a huge fan of Vista overall, but I'm not sure that I would recommend it for you in this case. However, your AXP is somewhat faster than mine was, and your video card is a LOT faster (X1950GT vs. 9700 Pro)...so it may work for you.

 

[ultra laser]

I tried vista ultimate x64 on my office computer (2.2Ghz Athlon64 939, 1GB RAM) and it didn't perform that well. I did feel lacking in the memory department, and Vista seemed to use 100% of my CPU quite often - even when performing pretty basic tasks. Furthermore, I think Vista is more aimed towards the multicore CPU and 4GB RAM crowd. If I were you, I'd stick with XP for now.

 

[onlyCOpunk]

Well, I scratched the itch, and got Home Premium.

I'm using it now. So far everything is stable. Vista found the drivers for my nForce2 audio, and the system recognises the x1950gt for what it is. Performance is ok right now, nothing is going very slow. I'm just going to tinker around with it today and put it through some tests then switch back to XP because I don't want to get too attached to it before it's my time. THen it will sit in the closet and be the first piece of my new PC.

Anyways, I was pleasantly surprised as I have an old wireless card and ATA100 card to which I just extracted the drivers to a folder and pointed Vista to where they were and it worked flawlessly. THey were also XP drivers as the hardware was old and no longer supported, and they still worked!

 

[Pabster]

Originally posted by: soonerproud
With your system configuration, I would not even attempt to use Vista. The nforce2 and nforce3 chipsets are not even supported by Nvidia on Vista. You are looking at some serious headaches alone just for that reason. Then you add to the factor you are using an older single core processor with only 1 gig of RAM in a gaming machine.

I ran Vista just fine on a Mobile Athlon XP 2500+ and nForce 2.

It runs fine on a crappy old Compaq 5000 with a GF2 MX 440 also.

For gaming, of course not. For most anything else, it will be just fine.

This myth that you need a Q6600 and 16GB of RAM to run Vista is ridiculous.

 

[soonerproud]

Originally posted by: Pabster

Originally posted by: soonerproud
With your system configuration, I would not even attempt to use Vista. The nforce2 and nforce3 chipsets are not even supported by Nvidia on Vista. You are looking at some serious headaches alone just for that reason. Then you add to the factor you are using an older single core processor with only 1 gig of RAM in a gaming machine.

I ran Vista just fine on a Mobile Athlon XP 2500+ and nForce 2.

It runs fine on a crappy old Compaq 5000 with a GF2 MX 440 also.

For gaming, of course not. For most anything else, it will be just fine.

This myth that you need a Q6600 and 16GB of RAM to run Vista is ridiculous.

I never said you needed a Q6600 and 16GB of RAM. The op said he gamed with that machine so I gave my recommendation based on that description of the computers usage. Now where in that part of my post do I ever say you need a quad core and 16 gigs of RAM?

If you go back and read my post history you will see that my recommendation has always been for general purpose usage (E-mail, Internet, word processing and general light usage) I always said a single core with a gig of RAM is sufficient to use Vista. I also recommend that if a persons hardware is more than two years old to not bother due to the fact that it is sketchy finding support for Vista on hardware older than that. Most people having driver problems are using hardware that is older than the nforce4 chipsets.

If you are going to quote me to try to start a argument, then read the entire post first. In fact I will do that for you right now.

Vista alone without Anti-Virus or video drivers uses between 400-500 megs of RAM. Vista also has a lot of new services and processes running in the background that will spike your idle cpu usage on older single core processors. It is almost universal advice to not even try Vista on a single core processor. (Except for Microsoft of course.)

Am I lying in this section on how much RAM just Vista uses alone? Read my sig if you think I am blowing smoke. There are two Vista computers in this house that I built. One VHP32 and one VHP64. The rig with VHP32 is in my sig. The one I built for my brother is a E6850 with a gigabyte P35 mobo, 2 gigs of RAM, 320 gig seagate hard drive and a 8800gts 320.

The resource usage on both of the computers is pretty much the same. (The VHP64 uses slightly more RAM.) Both average at between 500 to 600 megs of RAM from a cold boot just for the operating system, antivirus and Nvidia drivers. (I disabled all other third party programs from starting at boot time) This is after waiting 10 minutes for superfetch to page the memory. System Monitor has a display for both superfetch and what Vista is actually using at the moment. You will find that information also in System Information. So no, that usage is not superfetch doing it's thing.

Vista also uses anywhere from 1% to 5% of the cpu cycles of both cores on these boxes at random times for random task. Now translate that into a older, slower single core processor and that means possible heavy CPU usage spikes of possibly up to 25% at random times. This is why most Windows experts recommend a dual core processor ( and not even a fast one. A Pentium D or Celeron D will do the trick.)

Nothing I stated to the OP was wrong and was based on both research into Vista and my personal experience with Vista.

You are much better off sticking with 2000 or XP on an older system like that. If you get the Vista itch, just go to the local electronics store and play with one of their displays to scratch it a little until you are ready to build a new Vista computer.

Now with the information I posted above is this not a reasonable statement? Am I wrong that XP or 2000 will give a better experience overall on older hardware? Just because you can run Vista on older hardware does not mean you should upgrade.

Now add in the factor that DDR1 RAM and older is quite a bit more expensive than DDR2 RAM is it even worth the extra money spent on that old hardware to upgrade to the 1 gig that Vista so desperately needs to run well? It makes more financial sense to buy a new computer with Vista preinstalled. You can find deals all day on a computer with a dual core processor and a gig of ram for around $350. The price of buying a OEM copy of VHP and extra RAM on these older platforms will run over $200 alone.

It makes no sense at all to upgrade an older platform on many levels.

 

[Pabster]

Sooner, I'm still going to stick with what I said. You certainly aren't the only one touting that Vista needs the latest and greatest to work, there are plenty of FUD spreaders around here. The reference to a Q6600/16GB RAM was simply a blanket reference to those who seem to keep perpetuating this myth that Vista has gargantuan system requirements.

I installed Vista on that Compaq with a paltry 512MB and an ancient 80GB Maxtor IDE drive. The CPU is the old Willamette P4 1.7. Hardly spectacular in any respect, it manages to run Vista Ultimate just fine. And guess what...Vista had built-in drivers for everything but the old 56K modem.

I've also ran with nForce 2 boards and Vista, again, no problems.

It is true that finding drivers for old(er) hardware can be a problem, but Vista is really excellent in this regard. Much better than XP, in fact.

If you want to play semantics, OP was asking how Vista ran on an Athlon XP. I've personally ran it on a Mobile XP 2500+ as I mentioned earlier, and it ran quite well.

 

[soonerproud]

Pabster, What you are leaving out is that Vista is as slow as molasses on a computer with only 512 of RAM. It will not give any where as good of an experience on that hardware as XP will simply because every thing you do will require heavy page file usage.

One of my buddies bought a single core Celeron computer with VHB and 512 of RAM to play WoW on. He brought it to me because he thought it was broke because it was so slow. It took almost 10 minutes to load the operating system because of all of Compaq's crapplets and not enough RAM. I first removed all the crapplets and removed all but the necessary start up programs. Now it took about 2-3 minutes to load Vista and the computer was very sluggish to use even for basic task.

I then added another gig of DDR2 RAM bringing the total to 1.5 gigs. Because he was going to be playing WoW on this computer I also convinced him to buy at least a 8500gt to improve his game play because of the onboard graphics. (The onboard would have been fine on a non-gaming machine.) After these few simple upgrades, the system went from being almost unusable for any thing to being pretty snappy. It also plays WoW real well at 1024X768 averaging around 60 fps.

Nothing I have said is FUD and is entirely based on personal experience and facts. I never said Vista would not run on older slower hardware. As the example I gave you above points out, you will not have the best of experiences on Vista if you do not have the hardware to run it. You are leaving the impression that Vista gives a good experience on older hardware when that is just not true if you do not have at least enough RAM.

You also are leaving the impression that Vista runs all older hardware out of the box. Just because your hardware worked well out of the box does not mean every one else's will. It is a crap shoot on older hardware and Vista. The evidence of this is all around you just on this site alone.

If you want to play semantics, OP was asking how Vista ran on an Athlon XP. I've personally ran it on a Mobile XP 2500+ as I mentioned earlier, and it ran quite well.

Not true. You quoted my previous post and then accused me of making statements about Vista I never said. You did not address the op, but instead addressed me. Nothing I stated was FUD and you have not proven one thing I previously said as false. I simply pointed out the possible problems of running Vista on older hardware and you accused me of spreading FUD. Every thing I said about Vista is FACT and no amount of twisting my words to mean something else on your part is going to change that.

 

[ForumMaster]

personally i wouldn't. back when MS just released the RC2, i signed on as a beta tester and got a copy. my rig then was:

AMD Athlon XP-M 2400+ @2.2Ghz
768MB RAM
NVIDIA 6600

i didn't have aero but except for that, it was fine. everything worked despite the fact the the nforce2 chipset is officially supported. game performance was pretty much the same too me but it since vista RC2 was too buggy at the time, i reinstalled XP. if you want to run vista, you can. but you'd need more RAM. but then, there's no point in spending more cash on your rig.

i'd keep XP on there and save for a new machine.

 

[onlyCOpunk]

Whoa guys, settle.

So I gave Vista whirl. It ran fine. Also I was having problem with the Catalyst 7.9 drivers but those are resolved now. Having switched from an nVidia card I assumed that the drivers worked for all cards, but they don't! Lesson learned. I'm back to XP after only 2 days. Vista was fun and it ran alright, I didn't get to play any games though. My RAM usage in the performance monitor stayed around 500-600mb, nothing less then I expected. I decided not to get too used to Vista as I knew I would eventually get sick of it, yet love it at the same time.