[Notary Sojac]

Feel free to post a "Captain Obvious" graph if you have one - no offense will be taken!

[raybbr]

ping

[backhoe]

You know, Microsoft has done about as good a job, shooting itself in the foot over this, as I have ever seen. I expect when my Win2000 pro, and my wife’s XP gets too long in the tooth, we’ll be learning Linux. I’ve just heard too many bad things about Vista to even consider it.

[Pistolshot]

I've been running Vista on two machines , one since the Beta came out for testing. No issues here.

It is a memory hog, and drivers for some hardware and programs are still in need, but as an operating system, at least for me, it works fine.

I do a lot of database management and online gaming(World of Warcraft,COD4,etc). My primary system is an older P4 H/T 3.4 with 2Gigs of mem, it runs fine with Vista Pro, and manages not only the house server, but the router, wireless, and movie/music downloads. I can run as many windows open for work as needed and see no degradation in performance.

Vista suffers from program compatibilities and a lot of hardware drivers that are not as yet written. As with any MS product, and I have been using MS since DOS 3, there are always development bugs. This same 'crucifiction' of Vista occured when XP came out and now with corrections over the years, XP is fairly reliable(Blue Screen of Death anyone?).

Expect Vista to be in that same vein and improve over the coming years. The 64-bit operators I know are loving Vista, and want more programing made available for it.

[Chasaway]

So, I loaded the Vista sound theme onto my XP box. Now mine sounds like Vista but plays like XP.

That’s about as far as I’m willing to go.

[ovrtaxt]

I guess MS needs to release a service pack to really foul up XP, so everyone will be willing to drink the Vista kool-aid.

[RayChuang88]

Given that memory is so cheap nowadays and that in many ways, Windows Vista still works better with the latest Intel and AMD multi-core CPU's, I'd take Windows Vista with SP1 on a new machine. An older machine with about 768 to 1 GB of RAM works better with Windows XP, though.

[martin_fierro]

[aft_lizard]

Yeah of course Vista is going to underperform against and older platform when it is purposely derailed with 1 gig of ram and a slow processor, yep thats a fair fight.

[martin_fierro]

[PushinTin]

Oh, and I believe I read somewhere that DirectX 10 is quite the memory hog also. Your right though, it is mainly for gamers, but they LOVE it...

[2111USMC]

We have XP boxes, one Vista box, and two W2K boxes running in this house (I run XP Pro for work on my laptop,)

I love my W2K. Compared to many OS's it's frigging bullet-proof.

[wendy1946]

Our CRN Test Center conducted a faceoff-type of performance evaluation. Testing was done on two identical desktops: HP (NYSE:HPQ)'s rp5700 model with a single 160 GB SATA drive on each machine, 1.8 GHz dual-core Intel (NSDQ:INTC) processors and 1 GB RAM on both.

It's common knowledge that Vista has to have 2gb of ram as a sort of a floor. Memory is cheap enough now that a claim of something like this to be a reasonable test is BS.