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best way to find out is if you have both Operating systems.

in 3dmark06,pcmark05 and sciencemark

i scored higher with Vista. than i do when i switch over to XP.

my vista out performs my XP sp2, SP3, and another comp with same specs running xp corp edition.

If anyone tells you Vista is Garbage. then disregard anything else they say.

then again. even with vista being new. Windows 7 will be out soon

I went with Vista because of DX10.1 and to be DX11. After some benchmarks I knowticed Vista is much faster then XP.

The only big problem at the beginning of Vista was drivers, every OS has its problems, thankfully Vista fixed itself with SP1.

If your computer can fly by with vista, get Vista, if not get XP

I was very undecided about getting Vista for a long time. Like the OP I needed a second OS. It has been declared by Microsoft that they want to stop producing and supporting XP so part of my reasoning for purchasing Vista was longevity, I didn't want to buy another copy of of XP only to have it lose support in a year.

I purchased an OEM copy of Vista 64, and it installed exactly like it was supposed to. No problems that were caused by the OS. Everything I use works just fine, even my ancient printer. It installs a heck of a lot faster than XP, partly because my version was 64. The overall UI is very handy, but takes a bit getting used to because they move some stuff around.

I found this 250+page guide to whats new in Vista, and it is quite remarkable how significantly different the OS works compared to XP. It seems they took the basic features and improved most of em and added quite a few more.

If anyone is still on the fence about Vista, its worth it over XP, though I hear your computer needs to be pretty new.

Q6600, P5Q Pro, Radeon 4850x2, Raid 0, 4GB ram.

For Gaming go Vista. Face it, its the future. No point in sticking with XP. Gone are the days when Vista was giving compatibility problems and all that stuff.... Its become lots better with SP1. And for gaming and music, get Vista Home Premium. Ultimate is Home Premium + business features + stupid ultimate extras(the only ok thing thing in Ultimate Extras is Dream Scene which lets you play videos instead of a desktop Wallplaper{totally unnecessary}) Home Premium ought to suit you just fine. And make sure you get adequate RAM. For games like Crysis in Vista, I'd recommend 3-4 gigs...

http://weblog.infoworld.com/sentin [...] he_vi.html

Better than 1/3 of people buying machines with Vista installed are taking it off "upgrading" to XP.

Enuff said.

This is not news. Since Windows 3.11 every subsequent OS has performed more slowly than it's predecessor, so there's no surprise here. Windows 95 was slower than W4WGs (by 37%), Win98 was slower than Win95. NT 5 (Win2k) was slower than NT4 by a wide margin. NT5.1 (XP) was slower than Win2k. Vista is slower than XP. Why, all of a sudden should we expect Vista to break the streak ?

Can a machine do "a" task faster on Vista than on XP ? Sure, "Train it" to do one particular thing so that it prefetches 50-80% of the data as the machine boots so you have a Vista machine that has a 50 yard head start in a 100 yard run. But do what it's not expecting you to do and watch the alleged Vista performance advantage crumble. This is the same "trick" MS pulled with IE to "prove" that it was faster than the competition. When you boot windows post Win9x, half of IE was preloaded making it "seem" to have faster loading time when you actually clicked the icon. Then we had folks like litepc.com debunk it by showing vast performance increases across the board when the parts of IE that preloaded were removed.

Think of ya PC like a car's engine.....think of Windows as your load. Two cars with the same engine take a trip, one has 3 people in it (XP). One has 5 (Vista). All things being equal which one gets the higher mileage ? Which one goes faster from 0 - 60. We don't need a stopwatch to time this. More bulk, larger memory footprint, more processes running, it goes against all common sense that, running on the same hardware, the bigger load will will somehow be faster. If commonsense ain't enough find one one publication that has published a test showing otherwise.

Jack - You may want to reread the article - It's not 1/3rd of 'people', it's 1/3rd of enterprise users. Software standards being what they are at most corporations, the surprising number isn't 1/3rd are being downgraded back to XP, it's that 70% are keeping it.

It's the exact same stuff every time there's a new OS:

Intel upgrades to Windows 2000 six months after Windows XP was released:
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inqu [...] over-winxp

Sluggish corporate adoption of Windows XP:
http://www.computerworld.com/print [...] 76,00.html

Microsoft offers new licensing terms and other incentives to jump-start stalled corporate XP adoption:
http://www.crn.com/it-channel/18821819

Three years after release, XP uptake still too slow:
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/0 [...] 00.htm?r=8

Four long years after XP release, more corporate desktops still using Windows 2000:
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Windows/X [...] Years-End/

Screw the car engine analogy. Think of it in terms of the cheap bastards running corporate IT nowadays.. PC turnover is what... a 5 year cycle at most places?

"Performed more slowly..."

Yes, on the same hardware, new versions of Windows will definately perform slower than old versions. A 5 year-old computer is better served running XP than Vista. However, on new hardware Vista will perform about the same or in some instances better than XP. It's no surprise, sure... but as memory footprints have increased, so has the amount of memory in standard PC configurations. Most PCs now come with at least 1GB of RAM.. a lot have 2GB or more. Just a couple years ago, 1GB was considered to be at the top of the scale... now it's at the bottom.

While Windows has grown with each new version, the hardware running it has also "grown". Of course, if you insist on keeping old hardware to run new software... it's going to appear to be very slow.

I'm using both XP and Vistabut whenit comesto gaiming Xpisbetter since I don't have yet a DX10 card still waiting it at the post office.

I was able to play Crysis with my ridiculous PC on Xp but on Vista I lost my sound and the games goes crazy.

I think that Xp is better for gaming up to now since the majority of the games have DX10 and DX9.

I think that it will be better to have both just in case since Xp seemed to be more rapid than Vista who eats all the RAM.

Better not to install lots of things on Vista though as all these will eat up your RAM and you will have little left to play today's games.

Go for XP!

New computer = Vista x64.

No one has been able to put forth a compelling argument otherwise.

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardwar [...] efault.asp

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

Gaming performance is largeley the exactly same in viusta s it is in XP.

The debate go's on. I have a HP with Vista 64 running a Nvidia 8800, a Toshiba laptop with Vista 32 and a Falcon Northwest with Windows xp 32 all with Nvidia cards. I work for a modeling simulation company. With that in mind here is my take. First I would say let the need or the software decide which OS. It's not so much that Vista or Xp is better, it's more a matter of how well the (games in your case) are written for said OS. That being said as we move into 2009 there are games that will take advantage of direct X 10, which by the way is volummetric smoke and light and "godray effects" like the lights coming through the clouds. Games like ArmA for example do not run well on Vista esp Vista 64. Games like Crysis run fine on both OS, you just don't get the DX-10 effects on XP. However Crysis is a perfect game to compare DX9 vs DX10. From there you can decide if DX10 is worth your while. I do not like Vista's attempt at security, the fact is it's not more secure so much as it is paranoid. You have to undo the security features, esp if you plan to mod. On that subject it is the modding of games like Gears of War and HL2's Hammer editor and ArmA that prompted me to go back to XP as ArmA runs much better on XP again it's the software not the OS. Note ArmA2 coming out next year will not take advantage of DX-10. I know the original writer of this thread had made his choice, however I know there are others who are still making that choice. If your out there please be more specific about your set up and I can research it to give a better answer. Again only my opinion based on the 10 gaming computers I have.

What security features do you have to undo? I've been running Vista on both my laptop and desktop and have yet to come across any need to disable any sort of security. If you're referring to UAC and for some reason you still can't run a program... then you simply run it as administrator. Yes, it will prompt you everytime you run it that way... but at least you can run it and you don't have to disable anything.

DX10 wasn't a deciding factor for my upgrade. I always eventually upgrade to the latest version of Windows simply because I like to run the latest version. There's no better way to familiarize yourself with it than to run it. After all, a lot of machines coming across my bench are coming with it now.

xp without a doubt i use both xp and vista, like most gamers I choose xp for gaming. Vista I use but hate to many reasons to dislike, if you are useless with computers and like wasting time then go with Vista.