I handing down my old Window 2K computer and building a new. Building one with DX10 video cards.

I'm torn between XP and Vista.

I have Vista Home Premium on a laptop and it's okay.... kinda clever and nice to look at, but plenty of my old software doesn't work with it.

While I can still buy XP Pro I need to make a decision to fore go the DX10 gaming I'd get with Vista and go with XP so all the stuff and games that currently work in Win2K will continue to work.

However, I need a little nudge from some other's

I mean Vista will be the supported OS from Microbloat, err Microsoft

Vista 64-bit all the way.

Heya,

If you google DX10 on XP, you'll note that you do not need Vista for DX10 gaming.

That said, I will not use Vista until it is stripped down to bare bones and completely overhauled to get its resource hogging down to an efficient level that is acceptable, rather than basically running a "game" as an OS, with other applications running on top of it. Ridiculous.

Very best,

...and if you actually take the time to read and understand that DX 10 project, you'd see it's been abandoned and never really worked in the first place.


Vista's bugs have been worked out for the most part and the performance gap that existed at release has been closed now that makers have figured out how to write good drivers. References:

http://www.extremetech.com/article [...] 495,00.asp and
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardwar [...] efault.asp

But a lot of people don't like Vista, or don't want to change, or whatever - and 32 bit XP is still an excellent choice. If you like it, then use it please.



Let me ask, though - What kind of a setup are you looking at? For most purposes you'd be fine going either way, but think about what you want to do - Add up the amount of memory on your Video Card(s), the amount of RAM you want to run, and add about 750MB for system. If that total exceeds 4GB, then if you want to actually use it all you will be forced to use a 64 bit OS. If so, than Vista 64 is clearly the way to go.

Well, I have been changing my mind regarding the system I'm building and the OS I want to run on it daily

Finally bit the bullet and bought everything to day.

I mostly use the computer to play games and of course browse the Internet and email. My gaming demands are not very lofty. I play Guild Wars, Last Chaos, Archlord and occasionally the old Ghost Recon. I usually keep my system until there is a game I absolutely have to play and my computer can't meet it's requirements. No games have really lit me up but would have liked to try Company of Heroes. I played the demo my old warhorse of a computer couldn't make the frame rates. Anyway, I digress.

I picked up a Gigabyte EP35-DS3L Mobo,
2 GB PC6400 DDR2 Kingston RAM,
E8400 Core 2 Duo retail CPU,
Corsair 650W PSU,
Two Seagate Barracuda 320GB SATA drives with 16 MB cache,
Sony DVD RW 20X SATA Optical Drive,
Coolermaster Centurion Mid Tower case,

and for a El cheapo Video card I bought a GeForce 8500 GT 512 PCIe.
I'll explain the video card choice.....I paid $49.99 for it and it's much better than the old Geforce 4200Ti AGP I'd been using. It's only an interim card.....I am waiting for the next generation of GeForce cards to come out so I can grab a GeForce 280GTX with 1GB.

I think I will probably go with an XP Pro OS as all my software and games will play on it..plus Teamspeak will work.

Maybe when more games that I'll want to play are Vista only, and older games that I do play work in the OS, then I'll clean XT off and go with Vista 64. At that time I can add a couple more GB's of RAM, maybe bump up to a Quad core QX9650 CPU and continue to have a decent system for a while..

You could go with Vista x64 now and save yourself the cost of buying another copy of Windows later. XP is still a very good OS, but if you're building a new computer with the latest hardware... you're doing yourself a disservice by installing an OS that is very close to a decade old. Vista will game as well as XP and considering the games you play aren't extremely demanding, you'll be hard pressed to notice any difference.

Of course, this is all moot since you've already ordered everything anyway.

Thanks for the post. I almost pulled the trigger on Vista 64,,,to take advantage of the 64 bit hardware and ability to access more RAM. I did a couple of Google searches on VISTA 64 and Teamspeak (which is my communication software in games) and read that plenty of folks could not get it to operate properly. Also posted to three forums of the three MMO games I play asking if anyone used Vista 64...only had one reply in a forum....where the person indicated VISTA 64 worked fine. However, I never did hear back on the other two. I did read that Vista 64 and Guild Wars, didn't work well together.

I'm pretty much a plug and play person....I hate to have to trouble shoot problems between hardware and software....which in my opinion shouldn't exist in the first place.

I have Vista 32 on a laptop I bought...and I found out that my Paintshop Pro 8, Nero 6, PowerDVD 4, and a few other programs all will not work with Vista. That's $250 + in software that is worthless to me for my laptop. Fortunately they all work on XP. Adding those to problems with the games I play...it made the decision an easy one.

Maybe When Guild Wars 2 comes out and newer better MMO's are available that interest me and play in Vista, I'll make the jump......but I'm still going to have the bite the bullet and buy all new burning and photo editing software when I do go to Vista.

Cheers