Been trying out a few linux distros and starting to like OpenSuse KDE.

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It's true that Vista was underwhelming, but it is certainly not a repeat of Millenium. The biggest problem with Vista is that
when people ask me about it, I can't give a good reason for upgrading besides UAC, process hardening etc (security), snazzy graphics, and
IE protected mode...which isn't enough considering the hype, and price. With a new pc, there shouldn't be any problem, unless you are a gamer.

What rubbish

* Windows Vista performs very poorly against its younger brother Windows XP.

Untrue, especially now most drivers are polished for Vista. Vista boots faster on baselined builds than XP and also had better memory management with superfetch and other tehnologies that make common user tasks happen faster.

* Vista has not really had the backing from game developers thus far.

Untrue - its all about DX10. DX9 is a legacy platform. The DX10 titles are coming out thick and fast now for this holiday season.

* Vista is a disappointment when compared to features that were promised in development.

WinFS was the only real feature I miss.

* There have not been any essential features added that would be useful to personal usage.

Meh. Superfetch for one. DX10 for another. Or my personal favourite, far better security.

* Hardware compatibility is still not up to par when compared to XP.

Do a current comparison and that will be found untrue now.

* Open source alternatives to Vista are equal, if not considerably better in quality and security.

Rubbish. Objectives measurements of MacOSX, Windows XP, Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise and Vista shows Vista to have less security vulenerabilities than any of them. Ubuntu has over 36 000 bugs in its bug tracker!

People are too easily persuaded by *nix zealots that typically tend to be inexperienced young adults on a crusade against MS. MS has done wrong in its history but Vista is clearly the most well done desktop OS they ever released.

Caldor, I think a lot of it comes down to personal choice. Having given Vista a 6 month try out on a much better computer then the one I use xp on, I very much prefer the xp one. I find myself using it more often and it being faster...dont know why, but the specs for my computers are in my signature. I'm going to have xp put on the laptop in place of vista. When the next OS from MS comes out ill give it a fair chance too. Maybe ill like it better.

Having tried both XP and Vista I much prefer XP - to me it seems more user friendly.

This might be true.....but have you seen the benchmarks??? DX10, so far, has offered a few graphical benefits in a tradeoff for a lot of FPS's. People running SLI'ed 8800 Ultras get benchmarks in the 30's, which is totally unacceptable. When you pay ~$600 for a card, (or ~$1200 for two) people expect ungodly performance. Vista is the problem. Yes, it is partially due to NVIDIA's code writing team for the drivers, but when SLI seems to have no benefits, people want to run the same games in DX9 mode in XP.

MaximumPC has said that there is almost no true reason why they can't release it for XP....if they did, they'd really kill Vista.

If SP1 helps out, and it improves overall speed, maybe the adoption rate will finally go up.

Just my 2 cents.

AJ

I know that there is no technical reason why DX10 cannot be implemented on XP. Its a marketing decision only.

I think the poor performance is three fold on SLI with DX10

1. Bugged middleware - not using 2nd gpu - hotfix available from MS
2. Poor SLI driver optimisation by nvidia - getting better
3. Devs dont know how to optimise shader programs for DX10 and how best to use this new generation - will get better as time goes on

If many of you prefer XP, great, thats good Its your system and your right to choose.

Well DX10 is promising but by the looks of it, maturity is still far from its brother. After some time, Vista's performance should be better than before... or not if MS focused more on Vienna...

Don't get me wrong....I think that Vista will EVENTUALLY replace XP...however, I don't see it until sometime after SP1 comes out for it. It has some really compelling features, but until overall compatibility and reliablity is up, many people will not adopt it.

AJ