[Arkayne]

Man, I've been out of the PC loop for awhile. I gotta pick up a desktop to run this new medical imaging review software and a system I'm eyeing has an i5 processor.

It's preloaded with W7 and I plan to downgrade it to XP. XP will run find on the i5, yeah?

 

[crohnsy]

W7 is better than Vista and XP you'll be wasting the i5 chip by running xp on it...

 

[Arkayne]

The software maker wants it to be run in XP. When this testing is over I'll 'upgrade' it back to W7.

 

[crohnsy]

xp will work on the i5 but not up to the chips potential.

as an example I went from running xp sp3 64bit to win 7 64 ultimate and noticed a substantial performance increase. And I'm only running an intel core 2 quad 2.6ghz

 

[SkaredShtles]

Win 7 has a version that has "XP mode" - at least that's what I've heard... maybe give that a shot?

 

[binary visions]

If it's a software maker, I'm sure they don't want to deal with XP-mode. They want it to be run on XP.

XP will run great on the i5.

 

[syadasti]

Wouldn't hurt to ask about XP mode or another virtualization solution like VMware. Solutions using Intel's VT are about as good as native:

http://www.intel.com/technology/virtualization/technology.htm