WIN7 or XP or XP Pro?

[Devlin Malcolm]

Which would be faster for the software i'm using

I am using Cakewalk Sonar X2 Producer on a
Gateway Model-MD2614U Laptop
Processor-AMD Turion(tm) X2 Dual-Core Mobile RM-72 2.10 GHz
Memory RAM-3.00 GB
64bit operating system on Windows Vista

Which OS will make it run faster?

 

[RWhite]

Your post doesn't quite make sense. You already have Vista installed? Is it not working?

If you have not already done so, update your Vista up to Service Pack 2 (SP2). Vista without at least SP1 is a miserable dog of an OS. After updating to SP2 its not that bad, think of it as Windows 6.9.

Since you only have 3 gigs of RAM, XP (or XP Pro, no difference for recording purposes) is OK - XP will only read 3.5 gigs of RAM. But you may not find drivers for all your hardware , you need to look first. Likewise Windows 7 is an improvement over Vista, but you might not find all the drivers you need. Windows 7 will boot faster than your current Vista and may run some operations faster, but I doubt it would make any difference when running your recording software.

To sum up, look up your Gateway laptop on-line to see which OS best supports it, and use that one.

 

[Doctor Varney]

The quick answer, I suppose, would depend on your future plans for hardware. To begin with, in order to take advantage of more than 3GB RAM you will need to use Windows 7. Then, that depends if your Gateway machine is expandable. If not, then you might as well either stick with Vista or go with XP. That's either XP or XP Pro, by the way, as unless you're running a business server requiring advanced networking utilities, you won't notice any difference.

If I remember rightly, Vista was the one that had all the driver support problems (at least until they released the patches). Other than that, I don't have any direct experience with Vista - and neither do I wish to. I prefer to stick with XP.

Windows 7 is rated as the most stable of the lot so far, though might be using a touch more in the way of resources to load. What you'll find is that each release offers a good measure of backwards compatibility.

Personally - and given the specs of your machine, I would go with Win XP Home. But that's just me. When I have a question like this, I like to get a number of opinions to weigh up before making a choice.

Hope this helps.

Regards

Dr. V