I've decided 100% on 32-bit. Now I'm deciding between Vista and XP, either version will be home. Vista would be between Home Basic and Home Premium. Here are the prices I've found online:

Vista Home Premium OEM DVD: $118
Vista Home Basic OEM DVD: $80
XP Home w/ SP2 OEM CDROM: $92

My computer will be mainly used for games (Guild Wars, BF2, BF2142, COD4, FS:X, and others), watching DVDs, and doing things like word processing, spreadsheets, etc. My main worry is compatibility with Windows Vista. As far as I know, everything I use right now would be compatible with windows vista too, so that doesn't seem to be a problem. Also, I would only want to get Vista if my new system (not yet built, but en route) could rip it apart:

Gigabyte P35-DS4
Core 2 Quad Q6600 (plan to OC)
4GB Corsair XMS2 DHX
8800GT OC
Creative SB Audigy 4
Seagate Barracude 7200.11 500 GB

So I'm definitely leaning towards vista, but what are the main differences between Home Basic and Home Premium? Enough to warrant an extra $38?

Thanks

Mr Gates will like you more if you 'go large' , 4 gigs of RAM will be pointless on any 32bit version.

I'm really just looking for advice on the xp vs. vista issue, not 32 vs 64 bit...

I would go for Vista.

It needs more Ooomph than XP, but your system is definitely powerful enough to handle Vista as well as DirectX 10.

Powerful enough to "just" handle it, or powerful enough to manhandle that b!tch?

I would go Vista. XP, lets face it, is a dinosaur. You can't even use native SATA mode (AHCI) on XP without a floppy disk or some fancy slipstreaming. If you ever plan to use RAID or ESATA, that makes Vista an easy choice. And with SP1 out, nearly all negative sentiments about Vista are essentially amount to resistence to change. As far as Home Prem vs Basic, I don't really care too much. The core stability, compatability, and security of Vista is what makes it so nice, but I appreciate the eyecandy as well. I'd go Home Prem given you'll be using it for a few years, but Home Basic is a bit slimmer and cheaper. Up to you.

As others have said, and you brushed aside without really giving us a reason, it doesn't make much sense to use 4gb of RAM on a 32bit OS. Might as well either stick with 2gb and save some money. If you want to move to 4gb, it does make sense to go 64. /shrug

Additionally, I would recommend an E8400 for your purposes over a Q6600. The E8400 will deliver supperior performance in most games, nearly all desktop applications, and will do so at a far better performance/power ratio. The only point where a Q6600 really makes sense over an E8400 is video encoding, which you didn't mention. I don't think it makes sense to go quad for more money unless it will give you a genuine benefit, which in this case, it doesn't seem like it will.

PS. An E6300 will "rip apart" vista. You're WAY over your margin in that respect.

Why doesnt it make sense to use 4GB of RAM? Because you cant utilize it all, boo hoo. 64 bit driver support is pretty good these days, but far from perfect, plus unless you use over 4GB you dont get any performance increase over 32-bit. I would say defanately go Vista, but as to which flavor, I cant really say.

Go with Vista Home Premium. Basic is useless and you might as well just use XP. I know you don't want to hear about 64bit but you might run into some issues trying to run 4GB of RAM + 512MB of Video Memory on a 32bit OS. Besides not getting full use of your hardware there are some issues that can pop up in this scenario. Probably more then what you might run into as far as 64bit compatability based on what you say you're using it for.

Anybody notice how Vista is going belly-up? Massive price cuts, the "Vista Capable" class-action lawsuit showing hardware requirements were understated, even M$ admits Vista is broken. XP Pro is the best Windoze OS.

4 GB is just fine under XP, but you'll find a bigger increase in performance with another hard drive.

4Gb with a 32-bit OS will still work fine, you're just going to not going to be able to use more then just over 3gb of it. And that's system memory, so it includes the 512mb from the vid card in the 3gb 32bit OS's can see.

IMO if you go vista there's no reason not to get 64 bit, and at this point I'd say Vista is fine to get as long as your system is on the new side.. Vista rapes older machines, brutal scaling at the low end but really nice at the high end. So get the 4gb of RAM and Vista 64

EDIT: And also I'd google for all the differences between Basic and Premium, I got premium and have been happy with it (aside from the atrocious file copy times, which is just bad on Vista in generall - although they're switching back to a more cache-based XP system for this to speed things up in SP1 thankfully)

The reason I'm sticking with 32-bit is because:

"We can also see that the 64-bit versions take up quite a bit more memory as well. Again, the explanation is very simple: all of the variables are no longer only 32 bits long, but 64 bits instead. Typically, this makes applications between 20% and 40% larger, which consequently results in a higher memory footprint as well. File formats such as music files or videos are not affected by this.

The upshot is that it doesn't make sense to install a 64-bit version of Vista in order to better utilize 4 GB of memory simply because the 32 bit version would only recognize 3.5 GB. The problem is that while it is true that you would "gain" the missing memory, you would also immediately lose it to the system due to the 64-bit version's larger memory footprint. Thus, using a 64-bit version really only makes sense with larger memory sizes."

It only makes sense to go 64-bit if you're going to get 8 GB of ram. And I'm not.Plus, 3 GB is still more than 2 GB, so getting 2x2048mb ram is still better than 2x1024mb ram performance-wise.

And for the person who recommended the dual core versus the quad core processor - once you overclock the dual cores vs. the quad cores, the quad cores win even with the lower clock speed. Quad cores are also more future proof. And at this level of performance, any "benefit" you'd get in games from a "faster" dual core processor won't even be noticeable. I don't see any reason to get a dual core over the quad.

Hmm well I gotta disagree with wherever that is coming from. You should check out Anandtech's site for information on utilizing 4gb of memory.

I just can't see this extra memory footprint being so large that it would eat up nearly 750mb-1gb of memory that you would have 'freed' by going to a 64-bit OS. Pretty sure 32 bit versions recognise in the area of 3.2gb in most cases also? And again, that includes your vid card memory, so your actual RAM drops another 512mb there.

I'd love to see more information on that, like benchmarks and such because I haven't heard about this as a potential performance issues since it was briefly questioned early in the XP 64bit days

Haha well believe it or not that quote came straight from our very own Tom's Hardware:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/0 [...] page5.html

But anyhow, back to the main point - are we all in agreement that this system is more than capable of running 32-bit windows vista home premium very fast?

Vista home basic runs great for me. It runs faster than the other versions due to the lack of useless bloatware. It is the best Vista choice for a gaming rig.

Just for reference based on features:
Vista Home Basic = Windows XP Home
Vista Home Premium = Windows MCE
Vista Business = XP Pro
Vista Ultimate = All versions of Vista rolled into one.

"4 GB is just fine under XP, but you'll find a bigger increase in performance with another hard drive."

Can somebody elaborate on this? Do you mean a different hard drive other than my Seagate Barracuda 7200.11, or an additional hard drive?

I have used 32-bit Ultimate and 64-bit Ultimate. While it's true the memoryfootprint does indeed go up, it's like 200-300mb-ish. And, my ram was showing up at 3gb, not 3.5. Since ~250mb /= 1gb I have to disagree with Tom on that analysis, although I did read that same article and scratched my head. I've been using X64 Ultimate since it came out, and the ONLY program that I used to use that I no longer do is Coretemp. Every single game, hardware componant, driver, etc, worked flawlessly. Unless people are running antique software I'm not sure where the issue is. However, like I said, you'll be very happy with either, I'm just splitting hairs for the heck of it.

As for the E8400 vs Q6600, they certainly are similar, and I think you'll make a good choice with the Q6600. However, in my case I take cooling and power into account as well, and given the superior performance (in all games but Supreme Commander) lower price, and cooler/quieter process of the E8400 I think it squeeks out a win, especially for daily use, but that's just me.

However, lschmidt clearly has done some reseach, and has facts to backup his opinion...

I can't say the same for nhobo. Is his name a phonetic coicidence? I think not.

No, I haven't noticed that Vista is going "belly up." What I have noticed is that it has gone 100% mainstream, and has outperformed every expectation I had for it. DX10 is considered required now in gaming, and given ram prices dropping 400% the memory footprint is smaller than XP ever was per dollar of ram.

The Vista Capable lawsuit is a joke (PS, I take graduate level law classes.) Granted, Microsoft should have been clearer, but to sue overit is nothing more than a case of falling down on sidewalks. If you're dumb enough to not understand the difference between "able to to meet the minimum requirements of Vista Basic" and "Will run Vista like smooth sweetcream" than please get a lot more experience with PC's before you try to make recommendations to people on the forums. From day 1 Vista has been far more stable than XP was all the way up to SP2, and even compared to XP SP2 the stability was comparable. At 23 years old, I sure don't feel that old, but I swear, some of you act like you never used XP pre-SP2. The thing was marginally more stable than Windows 98, if that, and as vulnerable as swiss cheese.

And with XP, there is even less point in using 4 *cough*3*cough* gb. XP uses a what, 300 or smaller footprint when configured correctly? Do you really need 1700mb to surf your Macfanboi websites? Gaming? What? What DX9 game needs 1700+ MB of memory to run well?

Geesh.

lschmidt I'm not sure what he meant, but based on the rest of his post, I wouldn't worry about it.

The 7200.11 is a fine series. There are slightly faster drives out there (the new Samsung F1's are beasts) but short of a Raptor (which isn't worth it until the refresh) you will not notice a difference at all.

If you want too, use the Toms Hard Drive charts to guesstimate what performance each drive has under the conditions you use it most (hard drives are a lot more variable than CPUs or Graphics cards), but honestly the difference is going to be nill.

Ohhhh, that article... Yeah I didn't really like that one, neither did most people posting in it's comment thread O_o

I think what they were trying to get across there was the performance of Windows itself, and the loading/storing of applications in the system memory and that if you have more memory, you can store more/load faster from it. Unofortunately they don't actually give any measurable performance numbers, it's a very frustrating article lol. While Vista will use memory in porportion to what you have installed to improve performance, it will also release at applications like games require it.

But sorry for going a little OT on you, I just think you truly and honestly would be better served with the 64 bit version.

Your system will easily handle Vista 32bit as well. Only issue at all there is the unused system memory. As for Premium/Basic, you don't get the interface stuff in Basic, nor any of the multimedia players/burners... which most of us have anyway. Here's M$'s comparison list http://www.microsoft.com/windows/p [...] hoose.mspx

Maybe google image the differences between the Basic and Premium UI to see what the deal