Should I reinstall Vista?

[shlemielo]

As my thread title suggests, I just upgraded everything in my system minus the optical and hard drives. Vista (32bit business) is still running like a champ though. Should I bother reinstalling at this point? I would like to migrate the OS over to the SATA drive, since right now it's on a Maxtor IDE that's really freaking loud. Would I see significant performance increase switching over to SATA?

 

[Brazen]

Personally, I'm from the if-it-aint-broke-don't-fix-it crowd. If it's running, leave it alone and instead of spending time "tweaking" I spend my time actually using my computer. However, if it is loud, I would probably consider it worth my time to switch out a noisy component even if it took an OS reinstall. I know going from an ATA to an ATA drive would be as easy as copying an image of the old drive to the new drive, but going from ATA to SATA might require some HAL modification.

Maybe someone else can chime in with a way to prepare the OS to do a drive image from ATA to SATA. For your imaging needs, there is a free program called PING (Ping Is Not Ghost) which is very Norton Ghost-like, or boot to any old Linux LiveCD and use dd.

 

[shlemielo]

I'm not really looking to do a drive image, just an OS install. I'm also thinking about going 64-bit.

 

[nerp]

I'd do it. Small investment of time in the beginning, long term results. Vista installation is a breeze anyway.

 

[Scarpozzi]

Going from an IDE drive to a SATA drive will likely give you a slight performance increase. It really depends on the speed of the IDE drive and how much cache the hard drive has to work with.

Now, as for Vista....Vista Business is pretty stripped down. If you installed Premium or Ultimate, you'll see a slowdown from all the stupid eye candy. While you're restructuring, consider a dual-boot (Vista 32 and 64 ) system.....or maybe throw XP in there with Vista 64. You may need it for true 32-bit compatibility.

 

[Skeeedunt]

If it's running fine, I'd leave it alone. If you want to move to an SATA drive, I'd use the built-in Complete PC Backup to image it over. If you're bored and feel like reinstalling, knock yourself out.

 

[masteraleph]

Originally posted by: Scarpozzi
You may need it for true 32-bit compatibility.

Can you list a single instance in which something failed to work in Vista-64 because it was 32-bit?

The reason to have Vista or XP x86 is because something is 16 bit (or, because the originators were lazy and it's 32 bit but has a 16 bit installer). Anything that's actually x86-32 and works on Vista x86 should also work on Vista x64.

 

[agr8man]

Vista on a 2 GB RAM is smooth enough. What happens is that Vista has indexing. And what indexing does is that it saves the locations of your files on a common index table, so as to make searching and file browsing faster.Due to this, a fresh installation of Vista is supposed to run a little slower. A month following the installation, most of the indexes will be ready and will only require updating from time to time. This is the time when Vista's performance is nice.