XP or Vista?

M

M-26-7

Still Mildly Glowing
At this point in the game all the windows OS are old. Maybe not from a conventional view, but certainly from a technoligical view. Windows Vista's days are already numbered by Windows 7, and XP was supposed to be gone long ago. I have a Windows 7 beta so I'll probably tool around with that for a while, but when it comes down to it I'm going to need a serious OS sooner or later. I don't want to spend a lot of money as I'll probably only use this OS for a year or a year and half at most, but it still needs to be solid till then.

My question is then Windows XP Home or Windows Vista Basic Premium? I've been considering get the 64 bit versions, but I hear Vista x64 is better. I know Vista is considered slightly below Hitler in the list of greatest sinners of humanity, but I was wondering how much of this is hype. Since I plan to do a lot of gaming it's important that my OS be able to handle games without crashing and not hog resources during gameplay. Your thoughts appreciated.
 
For stability I'd go for the OS that's been out longer and has more patches. However, support for XP is not going to last, so you'll have to upgrade to Vista / 7 at some point.

I've heard experiences with Vista are kinda schizophrenic. I've heard of a lot of people who've had no problems and it runs awesome, and others who couldn't get it to run basic programs without crashing. Personally, I bought a laptop with Vista pre-installed on it. It had trouble running OpenOffice without crashing. But that's just me.

My vote: Get XP, then skip Vista and get 7. But wait for the first or second service pack.
 
don't forget that hardware support for both Vista and Win 7 are not assured.

so if you have an old rig, you might want to check compability first.

that said, i own a Vista Ultimate, but am still running XP instead. says enough, doesn't it?

for me, the only possible reason to upgrade would be if i upgrade my rig with it. my current rig is strong enough for both Vista & Win 7, but i can't run DX10 anyway. the rest of the added features don't really warrant me upgrading yet.
 
XP professional (nobody wants home, professional doesn't cost that much more). Vista is always (!) slower and has features you most likely won't need. XP prof. runs stable, fast and can do everything you need. Price for XP should be higher for basic (nobody wants vista basic, believe me) but far lower than Ultimate (if you need vista, use that). I think you can run XP fine for another two years or so. By that time Windows 7 will be bugfixed and a lot cheaper.
 
Forgot to post relevant hardware stats:
Processor: Core i7 at 2.66 ghz
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R
RAM: 2GB CORSAIR 240-Pin DDR3

Sounds like XP is the way to go. Is there any performance difference between Pro and Home?
 
Go pro if you are going XP.

Many know that I've been a strong defender of Vista. There have been allot of ugly untrue things said about it (seen in the XP Vs Vista thread somewhere here). Outrageous things, like Vista can not use Open GL!

DirectX ten turned out to be more of a joke than anything else. I have noticed more of a difference between 64 bit and 32 bit processing in relation to my graphics than I have from DX9 to DX10.

I've been rocking my free copy of Ultimate 64 since release (beta tested it) and have had some hardware compatibility issues but very few issues when it comes to resource management. Then again, my resources are over kill... Early on I had issues with some 64 bit programs. I would have switched back to XP if I could not run all my favorite games, this includes Fallout, Star Craft and DII.

AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ Windsor 3.2GH topped by a ZALMAN 9500A
8Gigs of Gskill PC2 8500
Biostar 750a SLi mobo
NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GTX/9800 GTX+

...WTF, its snowing outside... It's only supposed to snow once a year in Seattle! ONCE!
 
Stick with XP (Pro) until 7 comes out and is well-supported.

2 GB Ram is minimum with Vista, so you wouldn't really want to run it until you had more Ram anyway.

But, the real reason to not go with Vista is that they screwed up Minesweeper! The Vista version sucks. That's really all you have to know.

gothemasticator
 
If you're serious about gaming, XP is still the way to go. As a gamer you probably want to squeeze every ounce of power from your rig, and as it is Vista will do the opposite.

Also, do you want to take the chance of being one of those people whose computers crash due to Vista, or that the programs you're used to using don't work in Vista?
 
The life cycle and support cycle of Xp will last into the release of Windows 7, so skip Vista all together.
 
Programs don't work in vista?

Dunno. Been using it for over a year, everything works fine. Games play well, outside GTAIV at ultra settings, I haven't experienced any lags. I turned off a lot of the bells and whistles useless in everyday work. I have no troubles with it, really.

And you get the DX10 eye-candy in a handful of games.

I wonder if Windows 7 will be more lightweight, as the only real complaint I could have against Vista is the fact that it hogs a lot of space on my 40GB System drive. For some reason, the disk seems to fill up with 1 or 2 gigs spontaneously, leaving it with less than 1GB of operating space... weird. Thankfully, I got me photochops set up to use scratch disks on other drives.
 
Wooz said:
Programs don't work in vista?

Dunno. Been using it for over a year, everything works fine. Games play well, outside GTAIV at ultra settings, I haven't experienced any lags. I turned off a lot of the bells and whistles useless in everyday work. I have no troubles with it, really.

And you get the DX10 eye-candy in a handful of games.

I wonder if Windows 7 will be more lightweight, as the only real complaint I could have against Vista is the fact that it hogs a lot of space on my 40GB System drive. For some reason, the disk seems to fill up with 1 or 2 gigs spontaneously, leaving it with less than 1GB of operating space... weird. Thankfully, I got me photochops set up to use scratch disks on other drives.
Click to expand...

wooz, they've all got their Player Hatin Degrees when it comes to Vista.
 
Wooz said:
For some reason, the disk seems to fill up with 1 or 2 gigs spontaneously, leaving it with less than 1GB of operating space... weird. Thankfully, I got me photochops set up to use scratch disks on other drives.
Click to expand...

Have you disabled "shadow copies". They can eat up a lot of space (1~20 GB).

TBH, vista is annoying with all its "user friendliness", and the popups every time you launch something. If you disable all the unnecessary crap though, it works just fine, and DX10 support may just be worth it for some games.

I mostly work in vista, because there aren't drivers on XP for some of my hardware, but I still keep XP SP3 for backup, and for older games. I'd suggest, install both and enjoy life. For all we know, Windows 7 may turn out to be some buggy POS like ME.
 
I've been using Vista for a while now and I have to say I have had no problems with it, its never crashed, I mean there have been errors but most are easily fixed, I ran Vista on 1 gig for a year before buying more and it even ran fine on that.

I fucking HATE XP, I don't recommend it to anyone.
 
Wooz said:
Dunno. Been using it for over a year, everything works fine. Games play well, outside GTAIV at ultra settings, I haven't experienced any lags.
Click to expand...

Well, XP will always be faster, no matter what. On hardcore rigs like yours or Maphusios everything will do fine, but the fact that you can still feel the difference says a lot.

Wooz said:
And you get the DX10 eye-candy in a handful of games.
Click to expand...

Several hacks proof that this is only marketing. XP could support DX10, but then who would have bought Vista?

Wooz said:
I wonder if Windows 7 will be more lightweight, as the only real complaint I could have against Vista is the fact that it hogs a lot of space on my 40GB System drive.
Click to expand...

Well they made it more lightweight, 7 will not use as much memory when idling, so its overall performance should be far better then Vista.

All in all Vista is on a good machine a decent OS, but only if you pay for the upper versions. The cheap versions like home basic are basically a waste of money. Vista has some nice features (instant entire language change for e.g.) but most users proberbly will never need or use those.
Marketingwise Vista is a failure like ME, but thats MS mistake
 
Well, XP will always be faster, no matter what. On hardcore rigs like yours or Maphusios everything will do fine, but the fact that you can still feel the difference says a lot.
Click to expand...

I haven't played GTAIV on any of my WinXP machines, so I haven't 'felt the difference'.

Several hacks proof that this is only marketing. XP could support DX10, but then who would have bought Vista?
Click to expand...

Could, maybe. AFAIK, it doesn't. Is there a way to run DX10 on XP?

All in all Vista is on a good machine a decent OS, but only if you pay for the upper versions.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I got Ultimate.

Well they made it more lightweight, 7 will not use as much memory when idling, so its overall performance should be far better then Vista.
Click to expand...

Cool. Looking forward to it, then.

On topic of OS'es, I'm looking for something easy and very lightweight to install on a 10 year-old rig.
 
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