Make XP look and feel like Vista
By comp2man
@comp2man (204)
United States
December 3, 2006 8:17am CST
In my next few blogs I will intoduce some Tips and Tricks to make XP look and feel like the new Vista. This begs the question.."Why wait for Vista". Download the utilities I have mentioned and make your own judgment.
Vista introduces many new techniques to help speed Windows' startup and shutdown times, and to accelerate application launches. SystemBoosterXP (http://www.systembooster.com/download.htm) and DriverHeaven TuneXP (http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,63663-order,1-page,1-c,alldownloads/description.html) are 2 utilities which can tune up XP. SystemBoosterXP claims to use a technology similar to Vista's prefetching, which anticipates the files you're likely to request next and revs up your file loading and application startups. The program sits quietly in your system tray and needs very little configuring. It is available for $ 20 after a 30 day trial period. DriverHeaven TuneXP is free, (though donations are accepted). Itlets you adjust a variety of system settings to speed up Windows starts and shutdowns, and to optimize other system processes. However, it is clearly intended for technically adept users.
If you're running out of system memory, MemoryBoost Pro,(http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/file/fid,58859-order,1-page,1-c,alldownloads/description.html) is one to think of. It hunts down RAM hogs, recovers memory leaks, and frees up unused memory. MemoryBoost Pro is $20 shareware with a 30-day trial period. The freeware utility FreeRAM XP Pro aims to do much the same thing, albeit with relatively modest features.
Some expertise is needed for all these programs and the user may download and install at his/her own risk
4 responses
@zohaibansari (103)
• Pakistan
3 Dec 06
I have downloaded whole WINDOWS VISTA and installed, its running perfect, I will also try your tools in XP which you described above.
Anyways nice effort, keep it up!!
@ranimukul (130)
• India
3 Dec 06
Thanks for the valuable information... would be looking forward to your blogs in future....
@BlaKy2 (1475)
• Romania
15 Feb 07
Windows Vista clearly is not a great new performer when it comes to executing single applications at maximum speed. Although we only looked at the 32-bit version of Windows Vista Enterprise, we do not expect the 64-bit edition to be faster (at least not with 32-bit applications).
Overall, applications performed as expected, or executed slightly slower than under Windows XP. The synthetic benchmarks such as Everest, PCMark05 or Sandra 2007 show that differences are non-existent on a component level. We also found some programs that refused to work, and others that seem to cause problems at first but eventually ran properly. In any case, we recommend watching for Vista-related software upgrades from your software vendors.
There are some programs that showed deeply disappointing performance. Unreal Tournament 2004 and the professional graphics benchmarking suite SPECviewperf 9.03 suffered heavily from the lack of support for the OpenGL graphics library under Windows Vista. This is something we expected, and we clearly advise against replacing Windows XP with Windows Vista if you need to run professional graphics applications. Both ATI and Nvidia will offer OpenGL support in upcoming driver releases, but it remains to be seen if and how other graphics vendors or Microsoft may offer it.
We are disappointed that CPU-intensive applications such as video transcoding with XviD (DVD to XviD MPEG4) or the MainConcept H.264 Encoder performed 18% to nearly 24% slower in our standard benchmark scenarios. Both benchmarks finished much quicker under Windows XP. There aren't newer versions available, and we don't see immediate solutions to this issue.
There is good news as well: we did not find evidence that Windows Vista's new and fancy AeroGlass interface consumes more energy than Windows XP's 2D desktop. Although our measurements indicate a 1 W increase in power draw at the plug, this is too little of a difference to draw any conclusions. Obviously, the requirements for displaying all elements in 3D, rotating and moving them aren't enough to heat up graphics processors. This might also be a result of Windows Vista's more advanced implementation of ACPI 2.0 (and parts of 3.0), which allows the control of power of system components separately.
Our hopes that Vista might be able to speed up applications are gone. First tests with 64-bit editions result in numbers similar to our 32-bit results, and we believe it's safe to say that users looking for more raw performance will be disappointed with Vista. Vista is the better Windows, because it behaves better, because it looks better and because it feels better. But it cannot perform better than Windows XP. Is this a K.O. for Windows Vista in the enthusiast space?
If you really need your PC to finish huge encoding, transcoding or rendering workloads within a defined time frame, yes, it is. Don't do it; stay with XP. But as long as you don't need to finish workloads in record time, we believe it makes sense to consider these three bullet points:
* Vista runs considerably more services and thus has to spend somewhat more resources on itself. Indexing, connectivity and usability don't come for free.
* There is a lot of CPU performance available today! We've got really fast dual core processors, and even faster quad cores will hit the market by the middle of the year. Even though you will lose application performance by upgrading to Vista, today's hardware is much faster than yesterday's, and tomorrow's processors will clearly leap even further ahead.
* No new Windows release has been able to offer more application performance than its predecessor.
Although application performance has had this drawback, the new Windows Vista performance features SuperFetch and ReadyDrive help to make Vista feel faster and smoother than Windows XP.