Upgrading from a Sempron.. (also a question about Vista)

Got a Q6600 build coming on Tuesday from Scan with 4GB DDR2. Cant wait. My last PC I built for myself was a Sempron 2800+ (1.6ghz) had it for around 3/4 years. Have done alot of web and graphics design work on it. Will I notice a major performance increase? I dont tend to upgrade my pc that often, as most my spare money goes on bits for my car. Hopefully wont have to upgrade for another 3 or 4 years!

Also, Im really stuck on whether to go for XP 64-bit to keep the system nice and fast, or Vista 64-bit? I'm pretty sure Vista will just bog down the system, or is that a lie spread by XP fans?

Personally I'd go with Vista 64 as the support seems much better than XP 64. I really found XP64 stable but there was a distict lack of support for drivers such as DVB devices, some games, etc.

Since SP1 there is either no difference to me where pre SP1 it was obviously slower on my laptop.

Go for Vista 64bit. It actually has very good support (where xp 64 doesn't in my experience) and it does work very well. I've run it on an almost identical system to your new build and it flew.

It took me less than 20 (maybe less than 15) minutes to setup RAID, install vista and be sat on the desktop lol

As for the difference you will see.. well, I will let you wait and be amazed :p

The Difference is likely to be fairly big for you; it was when I upgraded from a 3GHz P4 recently. ;)

I'd go for Vista, simply because you can get Home Premium 64 bit for about £60 while XP 64 is £90.

You should notice some difference, i also upgraded from a sempron 2800 a few months ago to a q6600, and its much more smoother and stable, although my old rig only had 256mb ram which was the bottleneck for it, but i used for nearly 5 years and was a reliable partner :) i keep my rigs for four + years normally, so a q6600 4gb etc should last you very long time too.

As for OS, go for Vista, no point in buying a 6 or so year old OS, and i have heard bad things baout XP x64 so Vista should be better,