I was back and forth as to whether to keep XP or upgrade to the Vista Home Basic that I bought for $30 off of ebay. I had XP then I switched to Vista. Then I bought a new 250 gig HD, and I installed XP on it and ran XP for a few weeks but kept missing some of the Vista features and the cleaner, more modern look to Vista. So now I am back to Vista 32 bit. Vive la Vista.

http://www.winsupersite.com/vista/

Paul Thurrott has a website bursting with Windows info..

http://www.twit.tv/ww

His podcast with Leo Laporte called 'Windows Weekly' is a good listen. Also, I highly recommend 'Security Now' with Leo and Steve Gibson. SG is a computer/internet security guru who is a hyper-geeky caffeine-fueled engineer. He starts every morning with 3 coffees from Starbucks.

http://www.twit.tv/sn

Forgot to mention, Steve Gibson maintains/sells a hard drive recovery utility called SpinRite. On each podcast, he usually reads one or two entertaining emails from users of SpinRite who were able to recover data from their failed drives. It's amazing how many people and businesses don't backup their important data. These SpinRite stories are my favorite part of 'Security Now'.

Welcome. Lot of us here use Vista and love it. It's actually quite popular among gamers and enthusiasts, particularly Vista 64. I'm a big fan of twit too.

I dont understand teh Vista bashing either. I just finished my very first install of Vista Home Premium 64Bit. I was cussing it at install becasue i was having problems but after a reinstall and slowing down on doing stuff, it is running like a dream. I will prolly never go back to XP even though XP is a very good OS that i have used for years. I just really love teh feel of Vista. also is is waaay better when you disable the "Are you sure that you want to run what you just told me to run" notification

Thanks for the links up above.
I'm with the rest of yeah on just liking Vista better and I was one of those one's who did try Linux and OS 10 Leopard before buying Vista.
Mac's: 2-3 times the cost for a machine that can only do 1/3rd the work. Then I realized that most of the Games I was going to buy weren't for Mac.
This was a pretty fast RMA. Kind of went down like this:
"What do you mean The Witcher won't run... OK... Well I'll just pick this up then it got good reviews."
"No, sir that doesn't run either."
"What the ****! Is there any type of game that can run on a Mac?"
"Yes, Sir. All of the Teletubbies ones do. They like Apples!"

Linux cost me a computer.
"K... Place Section B of Section 2.48 into spot 045.2 then hit run. Now place Wine.run and place in File BA46-8 and then take those files and put them into Directory 4-7B. Now hit the CoD4 exe located in the Installation Folder located on your CD Rom Drive..."
"Ohhh Yeah Baby!!! Free OS for Me. Whoo hoo... WTF? Error 2146.43 What the hell is that?"
'Honey, Where's the Hammer at?"

being able to use a 2 gig thumb drive as additional ram is amazing!!!!

The feature is called ReadyBoast

Vista doesn't use a Flash drive as Additional Ram, rather as cache which is suppose to be faster than caching to the hard drive. There's plenty of sources on ReadyBoast if you Google and the only people who are going to benefit are those running the bare minimum like 512MB of Ram. Those with 2GB or more will see little benefit so it's a waste for such systems.

wow didnt know about readyboast, learn something everytime i get on here at work =)

I had Vista 64bit up and running in two hour's I elevated my administrative privliages to allow me to do what i please and i love it! By far the most easy straight forward OS install ive ever done!
Zero problems...

64 FTMFW

O yeah sorry I always get confused about that RAM, cache difference.

I see allot of Vista bashers but it really doesn't make sense, people with allot newer computers still running a 32 bit XP and saying how Vista uses all those resources makes no sense. Do they need free resources to make flap jacks or somehting on the side? I just don't get it. You should want to use all available resources not the opposite. Running a quad core with a 32 bit XP seems more limiting to me.

Many people that bash vista seem to have no clue what they are talking about and generally don't cite any facts, or rely on very outdated data lie benchmakrs using the very early crappy nvidia drivers, and of course there is also the people that have never tried vista and bash it anyway.

http://www.extremetech.com/article [...] 498,00.asp

Most recent benchmarks show vista preforming equally to xp in the games department.

I loved XP and still think it is a great OS, and I would still recommend it on lower specced pc's with 1 gb of ram or less, but on any modern machine with 2 gigs of ram vista is a great performer and xp really won't be any faster. Vista seems much more responsive than xp (And Linux) on my setup with 4 gigs of ram.

The most annoying thing is the people who argue "Vista uses too much RAM"

Free ram != better performance, It is designed to use ram to make the operating system more responsive and open programs faster, it is much more intelligent than xp's prefetcher and is optimized for systems with a lot of ram. If any application needs ram the simply purges whatever it needs from the cached ram which takes no longer than allocation free ram.

I gave XP another go as I didn't really want to spend the money on a new OS for my sons computer when I had a free one here. Then I hit the Wireless Networking and trying to get it to work. Spent about a day trying to get it to see my Computer and then I just gave up and placed Vista on his. 1 Hour later... I hit two buttons and that was that. Wireless Networking without the frustration in under a minute.

I use Vista Home Premium and I like better then XP. I've been using Vista since March 07. which was 1 month after it was released. Maybe you should consider upgrading to Home Premium in the Future.

I used to hate vista b4 sp1 arrives bcoz of the poor gaming performance. Now I'm quite satisfied with the gaming performance after installing sp1, especially in Crysis.