Winxp or Vista ?

[aidanjt]

There's a difference between XP being technically capable of supporting DX10, and Microsoft actually doing so.

[iranu]

If I was in your position I would do some research first with regard to what hardware is in the PC. If you are buying off the shelf then I'd make sure that the machine has 2Gb of ram and a decent video card before going with Vista.

If you are building one yourself then set your budget, make a list of the bits and then make sure that those bits have Vista driver support especially additional soundcards. This is mainly for peripherals like webcams etc.

With xp you won't have any issues, it's about as stable as any MS OS is going to get.

Iirc the specification for DX10 had a memory virtualization requirement that Nvidia couldn't do so MS scrapped it from the spec. This would technically make it possible for DX10 to be retrofitted to xp. I would imagine that this would require a lot of work and would have to be done by a non MS organisation. It would be madness for MS to do it!

[dangel]

Not used either - but as a general rule, being an early adopter can lead to problems. If there is a service pack release of Vista being released soon (as mentioned on other threads) then it might be worth waiting until after that relrease, which "should" fix the initial teething problems that some people have had.

The service pack won't do anything magical - MS are updating things progressively anyway - the crunch with Vista has been *drivers* plain and simple.

DX10 is vista only and always will be. I certainly wouldn't want to be using 'hackware' by a third party to try and shoehorn the capability into XP.

[peterb]

The service pack won't do anything magical.

The thread implied that the SP would sweep up a number of problems - must I myust admit to not having read it thoroughly - I have no intention of using Vista anytime soon (or anytime? )

However the principle of not being an early adopter (unless you are prepared for problems still applies IMHO.

[this_is_gav]

Not necessarily - MS recently dropped the one item that technically would have made DX10 Vista-only (see DX10 is do-able on Windows XP) and there are a number of possibilities for providing DX10 capability to a broader audience (updates to OpenGL, XSOS, Falling Leaf's Alky Project).

1) Using a source for information that includes words such as "screwed" in articles isn't great

2) Using T'Inq as a legitimate resource for anything has been proven to leave you with terrible genital issues.

As for Iranu, no. Just no. Vista works as well with 512mb RAM as XP does currently. If you found otherwise then you're either a liar, have dodgy hardware or drivers, aren't using drivers, or haven't waited until Indexing and the pre-fetching has done its stuff.

The only problems I find with Vista are drivers still (Creative...) and the soon-to-be-fixed Explorer.exe copy bug, which only rears its ugly head when copying over the network for me.

[Clunk]

I would also recommend 2GiB (or 2GB in old money ) for vista.

Last week 2 of my 4 sticks of RAM died, and while I was testing, I realised that I only had 1 x 1GiB stick in there, and it was seriously sluggish, even more so than vista normally is for me.

I put the other stick back in and it was back to normal.

I honestly cant see vista being useable with 512MiB of RAM, unless you were to turn off pretty much everything, in which case, you may as well stick with XP.

[dangel]

The thread implied that the SP would sweep up a number of problems - must I myust admit to not having read it thoroughly - I have no intention of using Vista anytime soon (or anytime? )

However the principle of not being an early adopter (unless you are prepared for problems still applies IMHO.

Which thread? The one I posted about the two big updates? If so, they're out matey, all official like My point was that the perception that a service pack will be the thing to wait for in Vista is flawed - the major problems have all been driver related and this, coupled with the fact that MS is updating it periodically through Windows update anyway means the service pack is more likely to be a rollup than a ground breaking release (aka SP2 for XP for example). The dark days are mostly behind us now - even nVidia drivers have started working (most of the time, or at least as well as the XP ones) which was a real killer for me. At the end of the day it's pointless to buy XP now - it's obsolete (period) and Vista, bar driver issues (which may not even affect you now), is a solid OS with a few niggles (just like XP). Updates will keep coming out, things will steadily improve. We're 8/9 months in now and third parties are finally getting a handle on Vista driver development - heck, even realtek are managing not to kill PCs

[Agent]

the major problems have all been driver related....

The fact that MS have had to release all those patches in the linked thread proves that it is not all driver related.
Unless you don't consider things like almost unusable writing speeds and the OS corruption AVI files to be 'major' issues?

Vista is getting better, sure, but it still has issues.
At the end of the day, if someone wants a OS with maximum compatibility with the current market, this second, XP is the best choice.
Sure, it will be obsolete well before Vista, but that doesn't mean it cant do its job properly.
It really doesn't matter if its the underlying OS causing problems, or the applications running on it. Most people wont care, all the majority want is a working system without the niggles.

The fact that this forum is full of users who really know their stuff (like Clunk and David Ross), and still constantly bump into issues kinda speaks for itself.
As the big guy who owns this site has as his MSN tag at the moment - "Ive upgraded from Vista to XP".

Not everyone has the same trouble free ride that you're having. Simply saying its suitable for everyone because you don't have issues just isnt fair.

[this_is_gav]

I honestly cant see vista being useable with 512MiB of RAM, unless you were to turn off pretty much everything, in which case, you may as well stick with XP.

I have used it. Work laptop filled with the usual gubbings I set up to test. The only thing not working was Aero, as it just had a crappy SiS chip, but as Aero is all in the graphics memory anyway (unless you have TurboCache or HyperMemory), that doesn't adversely affect performance side of normal things.

[iranu]

As for Iranu, no. Just no. Vista works as well with 512mb RAM as XP does currently. If you found otherwise then you're either a liar, have dodgy hardware or drivers, aren't using drivers, or haven't waited until Indexing and the pre-fetching has done its stuff.

I personally have not used vista however a couple of friends were early adopters and installed it on a number of PCs from athlons/P4/512mb/1gb upto 939/AM2/C2D/1gb/2gb and they found it ran better with more ram (as most things do). With 512mb it was apparantly a dog. Now things may have changed since then but I'm not aware of it. For a gaming PC 2gb of ram is advisable with xp or Vista.

[ash_rm]

I have used it. Work laptop filled with the usual gubbings I set up to test. The only thing not working was Aero, as it just had a crappy SiS chip, but as Aero is all in the graphics memory anyway (unless you have TurboCache or HyperMemory), that doesn't adversely affect performance side of normal things.

With Aero turned off it will use quite a bit less ram, since the "DWM.exe" process will be disabled.

[this_is_gav]

Well there you go then... turn off Aero.

[redlight]

All three rigs at home are now Vista mine is 64-bit and the other two 32-bit.
All run no problem and my kids like it. The kids problem is school as it will be running XP and Office 2003 for the forseeable future.
Of course there have been minor niggles but that is to be expected.
Setting three Vista rigs up on my homes wired network was a breeze.
I remember when XP was released driver support was far worse than it has been with Vista and it was exactly the same with needing more memory.
The worst of it is behind me and I wont be going back.
I am sitting typing this on on XP as I still dual boot for the stuff that does not work with 64-bit like my phone software.
The same as when XP was released I held on to 98 on one of my rigs for at least a year.

[MadduckUK]

I remember when XP was released driver support was far worse than it has been with Vista

i remember using Windows 2000 drivers for everything and it working fine?

[redlight]

i remember using Windows 2000 drivers for everything and it working fine?

Not my scanner or laser printer for starters.
And modems were a nightmare

[Tomahawk]

If you want pretty solid and reliable, get XP, if you want buggy, slow and unreliable with poor driver support, and hit and miss performance, get vista.

I haven't moved to Vista, but have used it to keep up-to-date with the new OS, but I really didn't like it. The 'security' features built in to Vista really bug me, I want to control my system and know what's going on and not have an operating system making decisions for me!

It seems they've spent alot of time making the GUI look really fancy and all the glassy effects etc.. is not what I want from an OS. I like something useable, functional and powerful. To be honest I haven't given it a complete run through and really made use of all the features, but I got put off and prefer my rock solid, fully customized and functional XP system.

I look forward to when Vista becomes more stable, but don't like it when they bring out software/games which are 'vista only', I would like the choice! Just my thoughts..