This worked for me, so I thought I'd share.

I have a Pentium D 2.8 Processor, nVidia 9800 GT with 512MB, 2 Gigs of ram.
I had updated to Vista (I won a copy of it, so thought I would try it out) not long after Fallout 3 came out.
I hadn't really noticed how bad Vista ran on my machine until I bought a new hard drive and went back to XP.
I re-downloaded Fallout New Vegas from Steam, and the differences are incredible.

Fallout New Vegas under Vista:
Horrible Lag, on the lowest settings ALL THE TIME!

Fallout New Vegas under XP:
Game auto-detected "High" settings and plays with VERY LITTLE pause.
At some times I will get a slight pause and I can see a few textures or objects loading in the distance.
All LODs are maxed!

I really can't believe how much of an improvement this is, and I hope it helps somebody else out.

my $0.02
kp

You need more than 2GB of RAM to play games smoothly under Vista and since the best performance comes from using 2 sticks
in dual-channel mode the general rule is : 4GB for Vista and 2GB for XP. With your hardware - best stick to XP.

Couple things,

First of all, Windows XP is nearly ten years old. Please stop using it. Please. Everybody, please stop using it now. Secondly, you are using a Penitum D which is a poor excuse for a dual core cpu. The pentium D was a short-lived dual-core prescott pentium 4 that was handicapped so it didn't burn up and in many ways would be surpassed by a modern dual-core Atom netbook CPU. True story, your processor is considerably weaker than pretty much anything on the market. Perhaps in YOUR case XP works better for you but for 99.95% of us other users out there, the multi-core improvements in Windows 7 are reason enough to never ever touch XP ever again.

If the OP doesn't have money, you can't force him to comply with your suggestion. Personally I still use windows xp because performance alone can beat vista and 7 hands down no questions about it.

I beg to differ

You may think XP is a different OS than Vista or Windows 7, but at its core, it really isn't. This may be a crude generalization, but at the core, Vista and Windows 7 are just XP with a whole lot of bloat on top with a higher kernel revision.
As for multi-core improvements, well, I am not going to get into the technical aspects of the whole multi-core/multi-thread thing now, but when it comes to Windows, don't believe the hype.

The reality is, most peopledon't need the "huge" CPUs and huge amounts of RAM.

That's a very crude generalization. You could make the same argument for practically anything then, why not go a step further and say that WIndows XP is basically Windows 2000 (because it is) or that it's Windows NT with a lot of bloat on top of it. It's not hype, it's fact go and read the benchmarks. You're right most people don't need huge CPUs and lots of RAM but you do if you want to play modern games. Windows XP is seriously old, when it came out WTC just happened. Actually, the non-retail version came out before WTC happened. George Bush was in his first year of his first term. Nintendo was still on the Nintendo 64 and Gamecube and MS's Xbox 1 hadn't been released yet. Not a single Harry Potter or LOTR film was in theaters yet. Windows 98 was younger than Vista is today. Miley Cyrus was 8 years old. Etc....

The OP is right. It's true that XP is a very old OS now BUT it uses a lot less resources than Vista (especially unoptimized Vista) hence leaving more resources for gaming (which the OP's computer needs since it's components are very modest to say the least, no offense OP!)

Win7 uses more resources than XP, but much less than Vista.

Wow thats alot of WinXp hate right there. I'm glad to know that your experience with Win7 has been a good one. Win7 is a great OS. However like the above poster (thou with Vista) I seem to get over all a better gaming experience with WinXP even now. And before you think I'm running old hardware I'll give specs.

Machine 1-
AMD Phenom II X2 550 Black Edition Callisto 3.1GHz Socket AM3 Dual-Core Processor
ASUS M4N82 Deluxe AM3/AM2+/AM2 NVIDIA nForce 980a SLI AMD Motherboard
1 x G.SKILL 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model (added additional memory afterward for a total of 4gig)
1 x Western Digital Caviar Black WD6401AALS 640GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
1000watt psu

Machine 2-
Intel Core i7-950 Bloomfield 3.06GHz LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Processor
ASUS Sabertooth X58 LGA 1366 Intel X58 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard
CORSAIR DOMINATOR 6GB (3 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model
1 x Western Digital Caviar Black WD1002FAEX 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
1 x NZXT Phantom PHAN-001WT White Steel / Plastic ATX Full Tower Computer Case
900watt psu

Yeah Newegg/Tdirect loves me =) On both systems I've got dual boots running WinXP & Wins7 due to having a combo of x32 or x64 apps. My copy of Win7 is the x64 edition so it should be rocking out with the full 6gigs of memory I have in it. Due to the x32 limit for memory XP is showing 2.99gigs of memory. However even thou it's a 64bit OS & can use up to 6gigs of memory (may expand it later to 12gigs) I click XP on my boot menu every time I"m going to game. With Win7 it looks a tad better..can't fully explain it really. It might be that in my head I'm thinking it should be better and look better and run a whole lot better so it just seems like it does. Could be my viewpoint being colored b/c it "should" be better. However for being a x32 bit os with less then half the memory XP responds better gaming and just "feels" more solid to me on both systems. Oh almost forgot..video wise I've ran everything from...

2 GeForce 9800 GT 512MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 in SLI mode to my current cards BFG GTX260 GeForce GTX 260 OCX MAXCORE 55 896MB 448-bit GDDR3 PCI Express 2.0 SLIed thou soon to upgrade to a 580 I think.

So back on point..the hardware is quite recent and still Xp comes out on top.



I see you doing this alot...putting world events/movies/etc toward the release date of XP. Why? I understand you want to show that it's been around awhile. Ok we get that. Anyway my whole point is I'm running both OS's and overall my experience with XP beats Win7 hands down. I still like win7 alot. Love the features it brings to the table. I can have the whole thing installed from a blank driver in under 15 mins. Over all thou for now for me XP is still in the running. Sure it's aged. But its aged well. To the OP - if it works for you bro thats all thats important.

... thanks for the "on this date in the year 2000" trivia, but what I am referring to when I say "the core", is the kernel. Windows XP was released with the 5.1 kernel, while Windows 7 was released with the 6.1kernel, so there seems to be only one major Windows kernel revision in the past 10 years. As a side note, Windows Vista was released with kernel 6.0, so it seems MS just dressed the pig in some silk with a minor revision of the kernel, added more bloat, and viola! Windows 7 was born.

Because Windows XP is old and I'm trying to emphasize it, it is really freakin old. If you are personally having a better experience with it, then I guess that's a reason for you to use it. I am forced to use XP at work and I use Windows 7 at home. I went back to XP after the Vista thing a few years ago but after giving it a try once they released a couple service packs it was better than XP. The game performance was the identical (but that was not the case when it first came out). The only reason XP has aged well is because businesses are reluctant to upgrade and also because it took so long to get people off of the 9x kernel. Doom 3 came out in 2004 and infuriated the then 40% of PC gamers still running Windows 9x. There was even a hack made for it. And people made the same excuses back then which is ridiculous when you consider they were running an unstable 16-bit loading DOS kernel.



You're right about dressing the pig in silk. Windows 7 is basically Vista and there was a report last year I read where 'under the hood' the two were mostly identical. I went from XP to Vista back to XP for a couple years, but then tried Vista again and was pleased that it worked much better after a couple service packs. But after the comical 'mojave' commercials failed to change anybody's minds about it they just repackaged it as a new OS. I do like the GUI updates they ripped off of OSX though. Plus, Windows XP is exactly as you described a minor revision to Windows 2000 but nobody seemed to care when microshaft dropped all support for it. XP in classic mode = Windows 2000 minus some consumer-friendly features