Snarfiorix's Journal: The sudden appeal of XP

Having to work in a support enviroment, you often end up in talks about the latest thing that is going to hit you for support. Now, in my case, I socialise a lot with my co-workers and often we get together at parties and the subject of the latest thing to make our lives miserable comes up. Such is the case with Vista, but what is noticable is how we chat for about 20 minutes about features, hardware and software compatabillity untill someone mentions what he done to his XP partition to make (mostly games) run that won't perform very well under Vista or are just not compattible to run at all. Taking any PC that can run Vista with all features , your sure to have a config that realy kicks arse under XP. Then when you start removing services and apps you don't need, XP realy starts hitting the benchmarks. The resulting XP builds I have seen so far (including a XP 64bit version) load with no-nonsense and bloat. Not using the OS for browsing or e-mail keeps it relatively safe and in case it does get compromised, heck, you roll back to the original image. Since XP can load different config profiles, optimal tuning for games is ideal. (we know they dropped that feature for Vista, right?) Some of my co-worker tweaked XP so much, it looks more like an outlandisch game console then anything else with awesome game performance. It is too bad that with all the licensing stuff, one would not be able to distro it. It kinda make me wish that Linux had more games to it's name (or more games would run on Open GL). Sure there are DOS emulators are such for Linux, but if one is looking to squeeze to max of the the system, one is looking to remove bloat and not add to it. But back to XP. It's realy funny that the release of Vista finally got us thinking about XP. For us, tweaker happy few, it is clear that with XP we can get more performance out of our (DirectX 9)games then with Vista, because it's easier to get rid of unneaded bloat.

Good point

[Captain Splendid]

Considering how many flavours of Vista they're going to roll out, it is surprising that they won't release a gamer-optimized distro, would be a great idea.