My Vaio (VGN –CR14GN) came with pre-installed Windows Vista Business. I had a tough time while setting up development environment on Vista. I blogged about how I went through installing Dev-C++ sometime back. Installing apache was also tricky. Looks like the world is not ready for Vista yet! Anyways, I was able to install whatever I need to work on Vista.

But, that’s not the happy ending. After 2-3 months only, I noticed

1) My system was dead slow. It started taking few seconds (or should I say minutes!) to launch any application.

2) Firefox started eating up most of the resources and clicking on new tab button (or any menu, toolbar button) took minutes to respond.

3) I had to disable few services for speed. Needless to mention, those were required for my work. It didn’t help much anyways!

I was irritated by the poor responsiveness of system. That’s the main reason why I thought of downgrading Vista to XP. Now it’s almost 3 month since I downgraded to XP. My system is fast enough for my work. No more annoying permission messages. No more tricky installations.

If you want to go about downgrading (or upgrading ) VISTA to XP, here are some links which can help you

1) Steps for downgrading to XP here.

2) XP drivers for Sony Vaio (VGN – CR14GN) here.

Tags: Technology, Vista, Windows, XP