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vLite'd Vista on "older" laptop


weltall

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K. So here it is. This is going to be long, but bear with me. I'm throwing out as much info as I can.

Compaq Evo N600c Laptop

1.076Ghz PIIIm (P3-Mobile)

2 x 128MB PC133 So-Dimm = 256MB Ram :)

60GB ATA/100 HDD

ATI Mobile Radeon 16MB SGRAM, at 1024 x 768 x 16 bit. (not shared memory.) AGP 4x

I had been playing with nLite and XP Pro SP2 for the last 7 months. Sometimes making a new installation on a given day and sticking with it for a week, or playing again and sticking with that for a month. Eventually getting something around 382MB iso. after about a solid month of using this stable and fast build, it's memory footprint was somewhere around 80 to 90 MB when not running anything but what I had installed. Which was Magicdisc (virtual drive mounter), a modified vista inspirat pack , and the normal background stuffs for my installed drivers.

Back to Vista. :)

I had been using it for the last two months on my girlfriend's laptop, getting accustomed to it. In XP, for WHATEVER reason, even if the only daily thing I do is visit the SAME sites, and do the same things, it tends to bog and slow down over time. I noticed her computer was behaving normally. I thought that since I saw no beneficial increase in performance from squeezing xp down to bare bones plus graphics lol, that maybe I could do something with vista and have it work semi decent. My results seem to be (about 6 hours into running it) much better than I anticipated.

I had to reinstall vista on my girlfriend's laptop, because for some unknown reason, under normal firefox surfing, and then shutting it down, it would restart but with no desktop. black background and taskmanager open. insteresting. I tried to figure out what was wrong but just reinstalled "Windows Anytime Upgrade" Vista from boot up.

For an example, hers is Home Basic unmodified, and has a memory usage of around 480MB (footprint I guess) with nothing running.

I know it sounds "funny" to run vista on something like this, but so far, after a couple of hours, it's running very sweet. Some major differences to the speed of XP though, and I definately don't mean in a bad way. minimizing and maximizing windows is faster. running ePSXe (playstation emulator) I have achieved better overall results at a higher resolution and with better sound options. (using the same plugins but with more intensive settings)

I know, I'm quite appauled (sp?) right now that it's running as FAST and as happy as it is. My only issue is that my ESS Allegro sound driver doesn't startup correctly. I have to disable and enable the sound driver every time I logon to get it to work. Any ideas? I uninstalled, reinstalled, and have tried the manager's way of searching the net for the best driver but it tells me the one I have is most current. I'm going to play around with drivers later. anyways. here's an edited version of my vLite settings. rather than tell you what I removed, it's actually easier to tell you what I kept. I can pull up my vLite and it'll show me what's still left in the install files but I didn't save my settings to anything so I can't show you what I removed.

Accessories

System Information

Hardware Support

Smartcards

Windows Image Aquisition

Windows Portable Devices

Multimedia

Screensavers

Shell event sounds

Wallpapers

Windows Aero Theme

Windows Calendar

Windows Media Codecs

Windows Photo Gallery

Network

Windows Firewall

Services

Application Experience

Desktop Window Manager

Diagnostics

Internet Connection Sharing (ICS)

Multimedia Class Scheduler

Secondary Logon

Task Scheduler

Universal Plug and Pray

Volume Shadow Copy

System

Disk Defragmenter

Help

IMAPIv2 Burning Software

Malicious Software Removal Tool

Manual Install (setup.exe)

Microsoft HTML engine

Performance Counters

Reliability and Performance Monitor

System Restore

Windows Backup

Windows Defender

Zip folder

that's a total of 33 things left. I managed to downplay the DVD image from over 2GB to down to 762,496 KB. I'm sure I could have squeezed a couple more megs out of it, but I didn't want to risk taking something I "thought" I wouldn't need and turns out would have. anyhoo... I use firefox 2 and Winamp, so that's why the MS stuff is gone. I was able to add in my drivers, the only driver that actually went in was the audio. the video driver and wireless card (PCMCIA Dlink Airplus G DWL-630 802.11b/g revision C2) both did not work. I had to download Dlink's "vista beta" drivers and install the video driver while connected to the net from the device manager.

In any case... right now I'm running winamp playing some 256kb/s MP3s with no visualizations and my memory stats is staying right around 187-190 MB with 115 of that cached. about 5-10% fluctuating CPU usage. So I grabbed vLite. With my knowledge of nLite, it was cake. modified it by adding drivers and removing things, and then transfered it to my 1GB flash drive and booted and installed off of it.

Oh, btw. "Windows Vista" theme, Vista Basic color scheme. I have the visual effects set to the fast default, but with drop shadows and smoothed edges of fonts. visual styles on the windows and buttons too.

next thing that is up is that I'm going to find a program to capture my screen image and record it. so I can visually show what's going on and how well it performs. Some may be skeptical of how well it's running. it's not blistering fast, but it's much faster than I thought Vista would have ever run on a 1Ghz P3M with 256MB of PC133 ram. :) Questions? Comments? I think it just melds with my hardware (except the sound driver bug) very well, and that's the reason it's doing well.

~

PS: edit... um, nothing bad to post, but thought I should mention that when I say FAST, I mean that it's running at the same speed of operating and running the same programs I used in my version of XP as what I have of Vista right now. some things are noticeably faster, and some are slightly faster. it's about a 30 second wait (timed it) from turning the power button on to being at the logon screen. I have no clue how well that fares...

Edited by weltall
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Nice,

Vista adapts itself to the amount of memory the machine has. So 256mb , it will eat less RAM. But will start to page more when it needs to.

But the question is: will performance degrade overtime? After installing different apps or after say 2 to 4 months of heavy usage like XP!

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oh, I have three partitions. one is for windows and some program files. the second is for audio, video, and a 4 GB max page file. overkill, but I don't need the space that bad. then the third partition is for my games and things.

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well... as I tested it out for almost a day, doing my normal activities (internet, downloading, installing, uninstalling, playing around, games ect.) I noticed that it seemed to run very well. I just got tired of the fact that my audio driver was having issues. I tried using various other ESS Allegro PCI WDM drivers to no avail. so i've given up on vista for my laptop. it's too old, specifically for the audio driver. if SOMEONE could make it lol then that would be different.

in any case, to feed my curiosity if seeing that vista would run on 256MB 1GHZ laptop, it does... and it does pretty well. (keep in mind the iso was shrunk from over 2.5GB down to 740MB!)

As I type, bartpe is loading from my usb drive (staples and radioshack are good places to look for 1GB and 2GB drives) and I'm going to reinstall XP.

anyways... I'll still be cruising around here if anybody has any questions.

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Man… you are playing games on Vista with 256mb of RAM and a 16mb graphic card?? :blink:

What games are you playing?

Try searching your audio drivers by manufacturer, chipset or try the Win XP drivers. Install it in XP compatibility mode! But be prepared for a nice BSOD to appear B)

You can also try some driver backing software and auto detect your vista drivers etc!

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I tired everything you mentioned. Evidentally in RC1, on this laptop, it worked fine!

1. The laptop is too old by standards for them to care about making a vista driver

2. I tried win 2000, xp drivers from various ESS chipsets... nothing.

3. I had it install the driver from the vlite'd version, and it worked until I restarted. then I had to go to device manager and disable and then enable it and it would work fine. but that's an unacceptable method for me.

I was running ePSXe in 1024x768.

Recently since then, with XP and Omega drivers, I have seen a beneficial increase in performance. Plus, since I recompiled a Nlite version of XP and seen how quickly it runs, I am convinced that the version I was using before must have had a glitch somewhere from the work I did to Nlite it which is the reason why it was slow, and it seemed that vista was running quicker. In reality, from the way I had vista run on the laptop, the speed was acceptable (and the graphics for Glide and D3D were more so increased than even now with my new xp and the awesome omega drivers) but not insane. (of course!)

It was fun and interesting to try.

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