WMP 11 for XP - Opinions

Although I was perfectly happy with WMP10 on my laptop, I decided to go ahead and give WMP 11 a shot to see if it was any better.

My initial impression that it was very bloated..at least for my system. It took much longer to load, and the memory consumption was increased as well. I dont use WMP 11 for more than playing videos and DVD's so I could not justify the extra bloatedness for no extra functionality that I would be using. I uninstalled it and rolled it back to WMP 10 and I'm happy again. Now keep in mind, this is a Pentium M 735, 512MB Ram, Windows XP. Not exactly a hotrod compared to the newer dual core systems.

Just wondering what other opinions of WMP 11 compared to WMP 10 are.

I installed it on my work laptop, almost the same as yours, and it too took a bit more time to load things. I think the library is awsome! and the new look was much needed. I think now that everything is cached it is running a bit smoother, but anything less than 512 of RAM would basically slow the player down to nothing. I'd say you need something around 2Gig cpu and over 512 of ram to keep things peppy, and a fast HD is nice!

I like it,
The look the feel is alot better imo, but I do have a little bit more power than your Pentium M 735 and I find it very smooth.

I upgraded to WMP11 on the laptop in my sig and didn't really notice much difference in the performance. I don't use it for anything but playing DVD's and other movie files. So the library doesn't really do me any good. Overall I think i could have stayed with WMP10 and been just fine. But with a decent system, the upgrade won't hinder perfmance to a degree that would warrant downgrading. IMO at least.

Thats what I figured. Many people say Vista and it's related software is bloated.....but bloated in the software sense is relative to the hardware it's running on. Seems like any software could be called bloated when run on slow enough hardware.

I'm pretty sure that this laptop, although it runs XP very well and it has the "Vista Compatible" sticker on it, i'm sure it would be a real slug with Vista. Gonna stay with XP on this one.