Nvidia GeForce 8400m GS help

[Anastasis]

Hello,I'm anastasis i'm from greece and i am 15 years old.

I got a new HP laptop with windows vista in it.

Recenlty i have had some problems with windows vista both with gaming and with coding (some C codes had bugs in vista while the worked pretty good on xp) and switching the compatibility (from vista to windows xp sp 2 ) didn't help much :/.

So i am thinkng of removing vista and installing Windows Xp and Linux (ubuntu).

I haven't done an operation like this before (my dad allways did it) so i am afraid about finding the drivers for my grafic card...Many people have told me that switching back to xp or installing linux failed due to drivers issues :/

So could you nice people ( :) ) tell me if there are drivers available for winodws Xp ? My grafic card is : Nvidia 8400M GS

P.s I have 2048 Mb of RAM and CPU is : Intel® core2 Duo T7500 @ 2.20 GHz

[hola]

It's much better (and faster, graphics-wise) to keep Vista. You may run Windows XP under Windows Vista in Virtual PC 2007 at no cost (but requires that you upgrade to Vista Ultimate, and the emulated XP machine graphics card won't be powerful enough for modern games):

VirtualPC2007 (free): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...;displaylang=en

WinXP VHD (free - Microsoft releases a free updated one every 3 months): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details...;displaylang=en

Edited April 5, 2008 by hola

[Anastasis]

I think it will be faster with windows xp :) Vista is consuming too much RAM. I will put vista back on once sp1 is realesed and vista gets better :) but for now i need Xp :/ so drivers any1 :P ?

[Alexw256]

Install XP and Serive Pack 3, and the Vista SP1 is out and as far as I know accually decreased framerates in games slightly. SP3 for XP upped performance significantly(XP SP2 already way better than vista performance wise) and is your best bet. IUse the lastest 174.xx XP drivers found here on LV2GO. You should get much better performance, but don't try to play crysis on that 8400M GS. Older games should run better though.

[Guest izhoooooooooooo]

U'd better keep your Vista-as I know, that book is designed 4 Vista ONLY! U may find various issues if u try to switch back 2 XP.

Vista makes full use of RAM(different from XP), so however much is ur RAM, it'l ALWAYS eat much of it. So just don't feel confused, and enjoy the latest technology that vista brings us!

And now SP1 has been released finally.

[Alexw256]

That is incorrect. XP can sucessfully be installed on the dv6500. Just check out some of these links to easily resolve any problems (mainly just finding appropriate drivers, you will not encounter serious problems).

http://forums.cnet.com/5208-6142_102-0.htm...ssageID=2693256

http://forums12.itrc.hp.com/service/forums...hreadId=1186577

http://nmwhit06.blogspot.com/2007/09/fresh...p-pavilion.html

Google "dv6500 XP" to get lots more.

Also- the fact that vista uses all of the RAM is not necessarily a good thing. As far I as I have seen, superfetch accually is DETRAMENTAL to game performance, but will cut half a few seconds off of program load times, i suppose, if you find important.

And the fact the vista is a resource hog (unrelated to superfetch) is not the only reason it is slower than XP. The structure and programming of vista is very different than XP and as far as games go, chops your FPS down. I remember reading some interveiw with a microsoft representitive about Vista gaming discussing its FPS loss, and all he had to say was it would be fine for most of the users. However, we are in the minority and have some idea what is going on in the computing world. Vista is slower, and theres no way getting around it. SP1 is a bust, it barely did anything to help performance. Most games remained the same- Crysis saw a 1-2 fps drop. Esspecially with the 8400M GS you should see siginificant performance increases, unless you have a need for extra security or flashly desktop visuals stick with XP. Remember to get SP3 too! It ups performance by at least 10%!