im gonna reinstall windows xp on my win7 laptop.. i think ive all the drivers for it..

laptop is 6gb win 7 64bit

any reason why i shouldnt put windows xp 32 bit on it?

a few things why im changing..

1. miss the old xp look
2. no need for 64 bit
3. i wont have compatibility issues with plugin anymore
3. i can use the older apps that never made it to win7
4. it uses fat16 which is needed for some samplers

i know i will lose about 2gb ram doing this but is their any reason why i shouldnt?

1. Windows Classic Theme, comes with Windows 7
2. If you want that extra 2GB you do have a need
3. What issues were you having before?
3. (since you have two '3' bullet points) you can use XP compatibility mode in win7
4. you can format a USB thumbdrive to FAT16 and just use that right?


Windows XP wasn't bad.. but I've found Windows 7 is more reliable over here on several PCs than XP was. Windows XP was more resource friendly (IIRC).

well i have a yamaha ex5 that wont recognise sample swapping because it will only read/write to fat16 formatted disks only with xp it works

aside from that though im just finding win7 more of a pain to use than xp ever was.. 4gb is enough ram for me im not using large sample librarys or anything like that and when i used xp last time i has 512mb which was workable..

so the 2gb lose is ok because 4 is more than enough for me i think..

also i meant the "xp look" and how it works it just seems easier to work with, not overly cluttered with design

and also a lot of the older applications i used havent been supported for win7 just trivial little things that came in handy now and again..

im just thinking everything now is so bloated that going back to xp and stripping stuff down to basics will have a better workflow

windows7 is fairly stable but so was winxp for me, ive already put it on an older laptop with a flickering screen to try it out and im thinking of doing the same now for my laptop i use..

one thing that annoys me is win764 has two different locations for 32 and 64 bit applications and it seems to just get really messy after awhile..

considered win7 32bit but since this doesnt have fat16 i might as well go back to xp

xp seems faster to me also

except you won't even have 4gb - you'll lose 0.5-1gb due to mapping (so you'll have between 3.0 and 3.5gb usable), and actual processes are limited to 2gb.

Sure, if you don't use memory hungry apps that may still be heaps (after all we all lived with the same limits for years). Personally for me though - win7 is so much more stable and reliable than xp, you couldn't pay me to go back to it.

yeah i mean i usually offline render a lot so im only sequencing short audio files not running anything heavy all at once, but whats so great about win7, ive had it for a year now and its not any different than vista?

its all a bit overcomplicated for me with the folder options i think id prefer going back to windows xp seems nice and simple to work with

I see nothing wrong with your logic if that is what you'd like. The only question I have is IS xp a license you can use on that computer?

1. Maybe there's some third party theme or similar you can install. You can also make windows opaque in the control panel somewhere in Win7.

2. 640KB of RAM ought to be enough for anyone

3. What plug-ins exactly? Everythig is working fine here with Win7. Usually it's just a matter of installing them to a folder that doesn't have restricted access due to UAC. In the worst case, just disable UAC

4. Again, I haven't encountered any application that works on Windows XP but not 7. I have an ancient old scanner with no Win7 drivers that I use about twice a year - I've got a virtual XP machine in VirtualBox with USB passthrough for that.

5. Pretty sure it does. At least it should be able to read and write to anything that's pre-formatted to FAT16. The minimum size for a FAT32 partition is about 260MB, and I'm pretty sure Win7 can read partitions smler than that (e.g. older <128MB flash drives and memory cards)

I find working with win7 like wading through treacle.
I prefer XP.

ps. With that I would recommend going XP x64, if the drivers are available for your particular setup. It's rock-solid stable on the machines I've set it up on (10 to date) and works very well.
Also XP (and XP x64) can be stripped back very well, whereas it's actually not that easy or profitable to strip 7. My 7-year old laptop running stripped XP outperforms i7 6gb laptops (I have 3 here) with SSD's running 7, in terms of general usage. Only in raw CPU power do the newer lap's shine, but that's not that obvious from the outset.

There may be problems with drivers for the motherboard/bios..not sure of the correct names and details but I had problems trying to get XP on a Vista machine. You have to get these drivers and insert them onto the disk media that you use to install the OS. There was something about pressing F6 to get the drivers to load from floppy however I did not have a floppy on my laptop. Hopefully somebody else here knows these details and can give better advice.

It may be easier installing XP on a virtual machine like Jimmig has said.

Good luck with the time sink

Mark

Well, I can understand how you feel. That said, I went with Win7 32bit as a compromise. That way I can utilize better all the modern features (like multi-threading and such)that my new machine has and still retain all the old stuff that I need. Win7 Professional and Ultimate Editions both have a well working XP compatibility mode that should help to avoid any problems. PCI Audio interfaces and other stuff came over pretty well. And yes, it is different with 64 bit - much much more pain and problems.

Also I think Win XP has much better interface. But it is possible to make Win7 look more XP like (switching to Classic Theme, disabling all the fancy graphics stuff etc). Still some really really annoying things remain, like the missing option to keep the task bar on top of other windows (don't know why on earth someone thought it good idea to remove this). This just gets me raving mad every time a window opens behind the taskbar and I have to switch on the auto-hide.

So why are you posting on here if you've already made up your mind that you're switching back?

XP worked well for me, in its time. But Win7 is so much more elegant and smoother in operation. And I'd say quite a bit more stable, and easier on your apps and CPU with the excess RAM capabilities.

I wouldn't think anyone who is into having SSD on notebook PCs, and into computer technology in general, as you seem to be, would have any problem adapting to Win7. Overall, there's very little to get used to that's THAT much different than XP, as far as interface goes. And what is different... I like better in Win7.

You might as well get used to Win and x64, if you're going to stay technology based. It's not that difficult. There's huge benefits to it when you come upon the latest applications. And the world is never going back to XP with you.

XP is going out of support completely in two years time. So if you use it for other stuff like browsing the internet you won't get any security fixes. Windows 8 is out soon and the desktop is more minimal than Win 7.

It should not be necessary to use the F6 / floppy disc means for installing drivers, etc. in a WinXP install, you can do something called "slipstreaming" to integrate them into WinXP on a new install cd. nLite is the program I use, and I believe it is free: http://www.nliteos.com/ Here is an article on Wikipedia that has a brief overview of slipstreaming: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slipstream_%28computing%29 and also a brief blurb about nLite: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLite_and_vLite

Good luck!
Baxter

The only driver that would need to be installed during installation of XP is ths SATA AHCI mode driver. Thhat's if you're instaling on a board that xp has it's own drivers for. One could only hope that since it's still supported that the updates have newer drivers. Otherwise your looking at running it through nlite to get the drivers updated at the least. you have to use text mode when loading AHCI drivers. with nlite.