Excluding gaming which would you prefer to use overall? I ask this because i keep seeing reviews that say vista is crap. I LOVE VISTA so much, my dad will love it even more when i give him this computer. I love the look, i love how fast it is, i love how the additions it has. The one thing i dont like about it is how it is using 700 mb of ram when doing nothing, My XP only used 120 MB. But that is a price you have to pay. I still love vista alot more than XP. I cant wait for a new os to come out.

I feel safer, I prefer the environment.
Sure, there are some issues (copying and moving files), and there are not as many programs available for Vista as there are for Windows, but it is much better behaved.
It is a tad slower, but I am a petient person, and will prefer long-term stability over short-term gain everytime. Experience has proven me right more often than not.

One thing that would be cool is to make your background a movie (i.e Star Wars).

Windows XP

Excluding gaming? That's where Vista shines in my book. DX 10 and the early frame rate gap with XP is just about gone. So why not Vista for gaming?

One of the main reasons Vista is using more RAM while 'doing nothing' is 'superfetch' http://www.microsoft.com/windows/p [...] fetch.mspx

This is a good thing. The OS is making good use of all that RAM you bought to pre-load frequently used programs so it dosen't have to pull them off the hard drive. I have 6 gig of RAM on my Vista box, nearly 2 gig of it is being used when I am doing nothing. This is not 2 gig of OS bloat! I assure you. This is superfetch. My Vista 64 with the 6 gigs is super fast and super smooth.

It also happens that, superfetch aside, Vista will need more RAM than XP. When XP was designed most PCs had 64 to 128 meg of RAM, 256 if you were lucky and 512 was luxury. Now most PCs have 512 minimum and most new PCs have 1 gig or more and 2 gig is quickly becoming the standard. They designed Vista with this in mind.

Does Vista offer all that much that is great and new over XP to justify upgrading your PC or spending a lot for the OS itself. This is debatable. Vista lacked a lot of the things MS had indicated or promised would be in the next ver of Windows. So in that sense it was a disappointment. I like it well enough and I recommend it if you have a new and powerful PC to run it on. But XP still has much going for it too. Maybe next time MS will release a killer ver of Windows we can all get hyped about, until then Vista is OK.

VLC will do that. Turn a whole movie into your bkg.

I dislike the way polls are done in this forum, because I can't view the result data once I have voted. On Other forums I can view the results when I like too.
Perhaps I can only view the results once the poll closes? well>

Speed- Actually, I think that has something to do with the site - I see the results as soon as I vote...

Lol i did that for half kicks and come 2012 ima pull this topic up and get get more results, i promise i wont forget.

I have been running Vista on my gaming rig for nearly a year now, and I have 0 complaints. Every game I play has worked fine for me, and I love the superfetch as mentioned by notherdude.. pulls up the games I play often very quickly. I dont like waiting.

When I can play two games in window mode simultaneously on my dual monitors.. and the PC doenst crawl to a stop.. Its a nice feeling. My CPU does spiek to near 100% when I run two games like this, but the RAM never gets fully used. Vista does a super job with memory management.

refresh

Voted XP, Have dual boot Desktop - Vista LOOK better, But that's about it. Laptop - Have one each, Just bought a new laptop with vista, If it wasn't such a hassle I would probably switch it to XP.

ChaosGS - You could end the poll sooner, as I beleive MS do to lacklust acceptance (Primarily at the corporate level) has caved in and is moving up the replacement "NEW" operating system to 4th qtr 09.

Also MS is now coming out with a SP3 for XP, So much for cutting support. Wonder Why. If it wasn't for bestbuy, compUSA, and simular stores selling preloaded Vista it would have followed ME.

For High end video encoding, my son ditched vista64 (Intel Dual Quad core workstation), Said it was about 25% SLOWER that XP 32Bit.

Editted to add.
Please note - I have NOT had a problem with vista on my dual boot desktop. No program, no Hardware, no blue screens - he** My old programs I wrote under Dos even run. The only real complaint, is the inclussion of DRM. MS should not be the world police.

This is speculation. I believe MS said at the outset of Vista's release that they were moving back to a three year cycle. Yes, they say they are advancing even faster now and we might guess that at least has something to do with the lack of Vista excitement. We shall see! I doubt seriously Windows 7 comes out anywhere near their projected date.

I'd need to see some serious data on that 25% slower figure on Video encoding, we need recent benchmars, not the stuff that came out shortly after Vista did. Drivers have improved and software has been updated. The gaps have closed quite a bit. As gaming benchmarks have shown. I'm not saying I know for a fact Vista has caught up. for all I know it is still slower. I'm just saying I'd like to see some recent studies on this.

Interesting results here: http://www.neowin.net/forum/index. [...] y589148599
PC Mark video encoding tests showed a nearly 12% win for Vista over XP (both 64 bit)

Corporate world has little incentive to make the switch. Why bother with any new expense or trauma when XP is fine. This is not to say Vista is performing poorly.