h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Entry: UPDATE - *How to Help Windows XP Keep Up With Vista* - A30649223
Author: Alex 'Tufty' Ashman [!] - U566116


An extended version of the original.

Alex

Erm, one point...

"the mainstream support for XP ended back in July 2006."

No it didn't, according to:

http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=3223
http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=3221 and
http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/?p1=7024

Mainstream support is still in force, until April 2009 at the earliest.

Traveller in Time not on Vista
"The 'ReadyBoost' feature of Vista does, as far as I have heard, not give any significant perfomance boost.

The USB access is not much faster then hard disk access.

Creating a pagefile as they called the memory swap file does only give a performance boost when located on the primary partition of a drive. Locating it (also) on a secondary partition just reserves more disk space.

The concept of the entry is also a little flawed: 'to keep their PC up to speed without having to buy Vista'.

When you install Vista on the same PC you had XP running will _NOT_ increase any speed or performance, Vista is a graphic heavy Operating System, most likely your computer will perform at a much lower speed. Though a fresh installation may give the impression of beeing faster then a 'worn out' older installation your fresh installed XP did give more performance then Vista will ever bring. (unless of course your computer is 64 bit capable _and_ you installed Vista 64 bit {only available in the high end} ) "

Hmm, that's odd - the website must have changed since this Entry first entered the EG.

I've reworded the pagefile section somewhat and made it clearer that the partitioning is merely to provide a dedicated swap space and not to allow more than one pagefile on the same disk. I've also got rid of the 'up to speed' bit.

I'll bookmark this for future reference, I can't remember all those handy tipps.

Windows has updated this thread. You should bow restart your thread.

|Restart Now||Restart Later|

Clippy yes, I remember that aggressively helpful little thingy.

Reminds me of the "howdy police" they have to greet you at walmart.

Well, this seems like a more sanely helpful entry - I shall try some of the suggestions.

I have a few problems with this entry. There's so much, and so much guff, talked about Vista that quite often it's difficult to disentangle fact from mere opinion. The issue that anybody who writes this kind of entry will come up against is that they lay themself open to the kind of scrutiny that could only come from somebody who works with OS's day-in-day-out. I don't, but as the PM for our organisation's Vista rollout, I've picked up more than a few facts with which I can pick holes in this entry.

So, where to start, How about here:
'the sheer disadvantage that the graphics-heavy Vista would bring'?
What kind of disadvantage did you have in mind? Vista is no more graphics heavy than XP. They both use windows, pointers, carets, icons etc. Did you mean the fact that the way it is implemented *under the hood* has changed, with GDI calls now being mapped to the Vista graphics subsystem, which in turn calls Direct X? If that's what you meant, then any application written for Vista will run a bloody sight faster with much better graphics than the correspoding GDI-based app. You just need a decent graphics card to run it.

"the single greatest improvement in Windows Vista is its support for 64-bit computers"
Erm, wasn't Windows Server 2003 available in a 64-bit version?

"By placing a separate, full-size paging file on each hard drive, including both internal and external ones, it is possible to dramatically increase the speed at which the extra memory can be accessed."
Why not make the paging file bigger? Better still, let the system decide exactly how big to make it.

"msconfig - Start this program using the Run... option in the Start Menu, and then select the 'Startup' tab9. This lists the programs that will run when the computer starts up, and gives you the chance to uncheck the tick boxes next to the ones you don't want or need."
msconfig is a *diagnostic* tool. It is *not* designed to allow you to turn certain features on or off as you desire. The idea is that if your machine starts acting up, you run it up in Safe Mode and then disable the suspect services or programs. Once you have identified the culprit you *uninstall* it. Then you revert back to running the machine without MSCONFIG.

The most productive first step one can take in optimising a desktop workstation's performance is to knock out all the horrible little applets that run in the System Tray. Lots of this 'foistware' can be uninstalled without causing any great harm to the installation, providing you set a system restore point beforehand. However, this has *nothing* to do with allowing XP to keep up with Vista, neither does resetting the paging file, and turning off the Indexing Service is going to deprive XP of the chance to emulate one of Vista's standout features.

I'd suggest you think through what you are trying to achieve by writing this entry. It's a bit of a mess, to be brutally frank.

Sorry, but I don't have time to rewrite the whole thing just now. I wish you'd commented back in February '07 - it'd be a bugger to get this back out of the EG now.

I'm sorry, I thought this was an Update thread, and that you wanted feedback on that update.

There's not that much difference overall.

Perhaps I didn't notice it the first time around?

Well obviously, considering you know about this sort of thing and you tend to comment a lot in PR. Did you think I was being funny?

Seriously, I don't have the time to sort this out right now, and if it's that misleading then it needs sorting out - either removal or a proper update.

"you tend to comment a lot in PR"

Not any more I don't. And I didn't think you were being funny.

The original Entry is flawed in much the same way as this one, so it doesn't matter that this is an update. What matters is that if I just drop this, there's still the original in the EG. It's your opinion that it's an utter mess, so it would really help if you'd explain what the hell I should do about it now that there's a copy of it in the EG.

Sorr, I thought (perhaps wrongly) that there was only supposed to be one entry of each title within the EG, and that implies that an update replaces the original. Otherwise there's not a great deal of point to updating, is there?

My opinion was that it was a bit of a mess, nor an utter mess. If you want to ignore that and post an update that largely resembles the original, please be my guest: it's your entry, not mine.

Oh, and another thing: Vista comes with the .NET Framework version 3.0 bundled. This contains Windows Presentation Foundation, Windows Communication Foundation and Windows Workflow Foundation. If you really want to make XP keep up with Vista then really should download and install these components for XP.

My point is that the entry omits very relevant information like this while talking about streamlining XP (nothing to do with Vista as these tips were valid before Vista was announced), creating extra paging files (applicable to any version of Windows and of dubious performance benefit as it won't actually change the point at which XP starts swapping) and overclocking. In any case, unless you are using WPF, Vista runs *slower* than XP for the reasons I mention earlier, so the idea that this helps the latter keep up with the former is a bit dubious.

I wasn't particularly active in PR when the original went through, otherwise if I'd had anything to do with it it wouldn't be in the EG. If you're going to update an entry, then at least make sure that the update deals with the more egregious errors, omissions and irrelevancies of the original, please.

>>>that implies that an update replaces the original<<<

Yes, but if I don't go ahead with the update, the original version will still exist. You've made it clear that the contents don't match the title and that I'd need to know more about Vista and XP before I could actually write an Entry tackling the subject, so now I don't know what to do with the original and the update.

Write the update, submit it, and ask the Eds to pull the original - if you're the author they'll probably oblige. If not, then at least the EG will have a better entry all the same.

Original at: A20701658
Update at: A30649223