Went back to XP... after having Vista preinstalled...

G

GeorgiaPeach18

New member
Thank God I was able to find drivers for my Gateway notebook which came preinstalled with Vista Home Premium.

While I liked Vista, and it was completely trouble free for the most part. I could not stand dealing with piss poor wifi range. I couldn't get 100ft indoors from a router that is just two or three rooms down.

Pissed me off so bad that even though I had two bars of signal, it still could not connect. I thought it was the wifi card; and I contemplated just buying another wifi card. But, like everything else I tried to see if my Realtek 8185 wifi card worked better for Windows XP drivers than Vista.... after dual booting -- sure enough it did.

And the speed increase from Vista back to WinXP is easily noticeable. I'll try Vista again in about 6 months, as this new laptop ran it fine -- it's just that Vista needs to get its drivers issues squared away. Aside from the "glitz" that gets old after about the 12th start up, there isn't all that much from Windows XP to Vista .... it's nice having an OS with stability right now, and completely working drivers.
 
Your gateway is a piece of shit, using their "XP" drivers in vista. They have power options that aren't optimized for vista and that's why your cheap pile of shit can't pull signal in. Don't buy gateway.
 
your a fucking dumbass man.... I wasn't using XP drivers you little twat. It came from the factory using straight Microsoft Windows Vista drivers. It's Vista drivers were a piece of shit -- sure it would work fine when I like 10-15 feet away.... get further away and signal would drop like a rock.

Cheap pile of shit? Uh, , how about a hell of a deal ... find me a computer that can run Vista Home Prem, with a 1GB of RAM and 120GB HDD for $549. Not to mention looks pretty smooth with scratch resistent lid, and aluminum for the palm rest.


Yeah, it's cheap -- but no one is going to complain in their right mind when the value quotient is that high. Not to mention this notebook is much much better built than the Dell laptop I sold before I bought this computer.

Also, where do you get all this information Mr. know it all?



Wow really? Where did you get that information?

Vista's really nice -- it's just not all there in terms of their drivers being quality. Next time maybe you should read a little bit better.
 
That's not what he said. Let me state that I don't know the first thing about Vista, but I think he meant that the Vista-drivers are just a repackaging of the XP-drivers, and that they don't work as well under Vista because of that.
 
You'll also be surprised as to how much better the drivers could have gotten after gateway released that laptop to manufacturing.
They probably had that laptop OS/driver image made 2 months ago, and chances are your realtek wifi card has newer drivers on their site. Should have tried those before going back to XP though.

Vlan drivers updated last week on gateway.com
http://support.gateway.com/support/drivers/search.asp?ref=step&st=browse&platform=10022&model=11015&os=10954&type=10095
 
Had the newest drivers available thanks. There was even one released from Microsoft mid February if I recall.... regardless of the driver I had a serious issue connecting to my router. Using XP; while I still have a "low" signal strength -- it still picks it up within 15 seconds and gives me internet. With Vista, I've had to enable/disable the wifi card every time I wanted it to find the router in my house. And even doing that wouldn't always get it to connect with it. Unplugging and replugging the router helped sometimes; until this week it just got rediculous and I tried just dual booting with XP; and sure enough -- worked far better.



My computer doesn't use the intel wireless card. In the first part of this thread, you'll see that I say "Realtek 8185 wifi card"...

Apparently, the only drivers that work with that card from that Gateway site you posted is:
D20053-002-002.exe - Broadcom Wireless Network Driver version: 4.102.15.61
Supports: Windows Vista
Note: This file contains the Windows Vista network driver for the computer models and components listed below. English, Japanese, and Spanish installation instructions are included in the file.

which was posted on January 30, 2007.

A lot of Vista humpers in this thread.
 
my cousin just bought a new hp desktop with vista home premium on it. 3 days after i installed everything for him, he's calling me telling me that he can't get on the internet. we determined that one of his kids was messing with the usb wifi adapter, so he went to best buy for a replacement (i guess he couldn't wait and just get a cheap one off of ebay).
he goes it install it with the cd (bad idea) and the installation fails. the box says it's vista compatible.
i really don't want to drive out 45 mins just to install a wifi adapter


his new hp runs like shit too. it can barely run vista and the aero glass effects are choppy. also, he can't load autocad or his antivirus on it. he wants to switch back to windows xp
 
Updated Feb 24th. : http://www.opendrivers.com/driver/236634/realtek-rtl8185l-wireless-driver-6.1070-windows-vista-vista-x64-free-download.html
I'm just trying to help.

I"ve had my own share of vista driver issues. Its a new OS, dont blame it.
 
So did you even bother to check the manufacturer's website for new vista drivers or did you just bitch about it not working?
 
The laptop wasn't exactly a close out; but pretty much very similar.... it was close to bait and switch... I bought it at Best Buy about a month and a half ago. It's a Gateway MT3418, which retailed at $749.99, but had an $200.00 instant rebate which brought it down to $549.99 with a free 3-in-1 printer.

I had to bitch at Best Buy just to get it; I called them to make sure the computer was actually in stock, and I got a "yes -- they're in -- we've got about 10 left..." I was like, "Great no problem..." I got there and was told they were all sold out. Needless to say I was like, "WTF... kinda pissed."

Make a long story short; I called back telling them I was told there was plenty in stock, etc. And they actually had one that was being "looked over" at the Geek Squad. Yeaaaah. So yeah, the manager could only temporarily hold it for a day. So I picked it up. It's FAR FAR better than the Dell, in terms of build quality. It's not a thinkpad; but it's very sturdy. Seems like Gateways have been getting better. As I said before aluminum palm rest is pretty nifty too....

Specs:
2.0Ghz AMD Turion Processor
5-in-1 Digital Card Reader
Integrated nVidia GeForce Go 6100 with 256MB of turbocached RAM (shared ... but I don't care ... I don't play games)
1GB RAM
120GB Hard Disk (4200 RPM --- slow as balls; but again I'm not going to complain given the price)
14.1" widescreen brightview (1280x800)
Realtek 8185 802.11b/g wirelesss
and as I said before:
Vista Home Premium

"Hate Crime" can bitch all he wants about how shitty the product it is; but I don't see any other computers coming close the value that this computer was. Granted, it was rather hard to get, but even at $749.00 it offers specs that alot of other computers don't have, only thing killing it is the lack of a dual core processor; and slow hdd.

Still, read the article I posted above this, apparently I'm not the only one having issues with Vista.
 
Laptops will never be a success in the eyes of enthusiasts until nearly every computer has a multi-core processor and a 7200 RPM hard drive.
 
Computer enthusiast... idiot.

I mean, these people are incapable of realizing that different people have different needs, different budgets and different expectations.
Not everyone needs to build there own rig... and not everyone needs to know how to either.

Idiots.
 
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