XP is back on Miyagi- XP 1 -Vista O

The mess that Vista SP1 made of Miyagi, my Fujitsu P1610, just got worse and worse.  I was getting a BSOD every 10 minutes or so and Miyagi was totally unusable as a result.  It was evident I was going to have to rebuild the Fuji to get rid of SP1 and when I said I was going back to XP rather than reinstall Vista I wasn’t kidding.  Last night I restored to XP using the Restore disc that shipped with the P1610 and that went flawlessly.  In about 20 minutes the Fuji was back to the factory state and waiting for me to reload my programs and data. 

Program install went without a hitch and in short order I had my core work configuration up and running.  I then copied all my data using the Asus EasySync cable that came with my R2H.  EasySync is a USB cable that plugs into two computers and it has the transfer software in flash memory on the cable itself so there was nothing to install.  The two computer’s files opened up in tiled windows and I just drug and dropped my documents and all my music from the HP to the Fuji.  It was 20 GB of files but took less than an hour, the EasySync cable is very fast indeed.

Once I had all my data copied over I downloaded and installed Windows Desktop Search to enable instant searching in Outlook 2007 and OneNote 2007.  In just 20 minutes it had indexed all my 40,000+ files and searching is lightning fast as a result.  My work will be easy to do with the system now fully functional.  I didn’t realize how much I’d missed using the P1610 until I couldn’t use it for a few days.  It feels so good to have Miyagi back!

I should cover how well the Fuji is running under XP compared to Vista.  Can you say snappy?  I knew you could.  That’s how Miyagi is running now, I had not complained about how the Fuji ran under Vista prior to SP1 mucking things up because the performance wasn’t bad.  I wasn’t having performance problems with Vista on this device severe enough to make me regret loading Vista, just the occasional disk thrashing and slow resumption from sleep mode.  Those awful docking/ undocking graphics problems were annoying too.  Now that I’ve got XP loaded back on it is apparent to me how much faster it is now than before.  Standby and Resume takes a couple of seconds, and I don’t find the hard drive active unless I’m doing something with it.  The system is downright fast, and I am a very happy camper.  I would compare the overall performance of the P1610 with XP as fast as that of the HP 2710p with Vista.  That’s impressive when you compare the specs:

Fuji- 1.2 GHz Core Solo processor; 1 GB of memory, 60 GB hard drive
HP- 1.2 GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 2 GB of memory, 100 GB hard drive

That’s pretty telling when a much better equipped mobile PC running Vista Business runs about as good as a much older device running XP.  Based on my experience with the P1610 for the past 24 hours I would not recommend anyone who is buying one of these, and I highly recommend the device, to order a model with Vista.  I can’t state it any clearer than that and I do get asked that question a lot.

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