which should i reinstall?

i switched over to vista about this time last year, then a couple months ago i wanted to play jade empire, and i've pretty much been using XP ever since.

both OSes need reformatting, but which should i make my primary OS?

Vista

For how long will Microsoft support XP anyway?

Primary support ends in March/April of 2009, while "Extended" (aka security-only) updates will continue for a few years.

Not that it matters, because if you have the system to run it, Vista is definitely better than XP.

Aye, unless you have an old old beast like my aged laptop, Vista.

Isn't Microshaft working on another OS release late next year or early 2010?

Yeah, they're trying to push out "Windows 7" rather quickly.
And I say XP. I don't give a damn if they support it or not, it's not like I need them to.

I've had Vista and XP on my work computer - XP has given me fewer problems and therefore is far superior. Windows 7 looks pretty promising, however.

No it hasn't, unless you used like, Windows 98 up until a couple years ago. Do people seriously not remember the huge ordeal with upgrading to XP when it came out? In any case, Vista's big issues, the drivers, are fixed now anyway, so as I said, if you can run it you should be.

Windows 7 is still far in the future at this point, with an early 2010 release date being the earliest possible release. Not worth waiting for.

That doesn't really make any sense...
He's comparing xp problems he's had with vista problems he's had

Yes, which is exactly my point. If he had used XP from the beginning, his statement would be false, since there were numerous problems with XP at launch.

Just like XP, Vista's problems have been resolved.

Ahh ok I get it.
I'll shut-up now =]

I have a few friends who use different OS's and the general consensus is that Vista is still very unstable compared to running XP.

I personally use XP because it supports Maya/Zbrush etc without skipping a beat (which is why all the local games design companies use XP exclusively). I also like it because I've had no problems with it. The same can't be said with my experiences with Vista which have been quite stressy at times. There's pretty much no incentive to use Vista for games at the moment either. The exclusive Vista/DX10 contract hasn't really had much impact either, with only a handful of games bothering to support DX10.

I'm sure Vista is fine if you're into vanilla computer use. I mean, my Gran uses it to browse the internet and type up word documents. She sometimes has compatibility problems when sharing files with her friends but most of the time it's ok.

I can't help but ask what the advantages of Vista are over XP. I've not really seen anything ground breaking that is worth the apparent hassle of upgrading computers or software. The only thing that I ever see is Vista users fiercely defending it, but for no apparent reason.

Let's pick through the ways:

1. UAC
2. More resilient to problems (System Restore is vastly improved, the system can recover from bad drivers, etc)
3. Faster interface (Thanks to Aero)
4. DirectX 10 is actually becoming rather popular, and it is faster in higher-quality settings than DX9.
5. Superfetch and such make the whole system a lot more responsive overall.

Just to name a few. And I have no stability issues in Vista, at least nothing more than XP had.

I've actually had less problems with Vista than I have with XP.

Ofcourse I'm in the minority but hey, its almost relevant.

Har, maybe you should upgrade your hardware? I use Z-brush all the time. I don't use Maya, but I use Cinema 4d for modeling / animation. I also use CS4 quite a lot.

i use xp and am too lazy to upgrade to vista.

It took years for XP to become tolerable as well. But I see no reason to switch Vista before most games actually require it.

lol windows

Aside from some understandable compatibility issues with some very old programs, vista has been running smooth as silk for me. I know some people who have had more troublesome issues, but based on personal experience, vista gets my vote.

More likely, they use XP because they have no legitimate reason to actively upgrade to Vista. This makes sense for many companies. XP is still very good, and although Vista has its advantages, it is not worth the cost and logistics of upgrading.

i loved vista when i was using it. like i said, the reason i switched back was because of a game that didnt work in vista (jade empire. even though it was released after vista, the devs said there will never be support for vista. ever) i dunno. maybe i'll go back to vista, but as i recall i had trouble with mass effect installing and running too. games are important. they arent the primary use of this computer, browsing and multimedia probably take that bill, but they are still important.

Mass Effect works great in Vista.

I need to clean up my Vista partition. I only boot into Vista for games. Steam is always messing up on Vista, but maybe that's just Steam's issue. I've seen others having the same difficulty though. All running Vista.

It messes up on XP also. Don't blame Vista.

Trying to decide weather to get that or not, is it worth it?

What, Mass Effect? It's amazing.

Also, Steam works great for me on Vista. I assume any issues you have are Steam issues. It's a great platform, but remember how it used to be? I'm sure there are still bugs.

Steam needs to install it's own SERVICE on Vista because A) it needs admin rights to install it's protocol handlers and some other minor things like game uninstall information / Game Explorer stuff B) if it elevated itself when run it would be running an Internet Explorer control with admin privileges, which is exactly the sort of thing Microsoft went out of the way to prevent in Vista. Plus you have all your games running outside of UAC even though they don't need to.

I personally see how a service is required, but populating my services list with all of my apps isn't my idea of keeping my computer speedy. Especially if they all start at power on and run all the time.

Steam would pretty much need to be rebuilt from scratch to work "properly" in Vista. It was built for the whole "everyone is administrator" pre-Vista world.

Also Steam worked fine on Vista for me, though I believe I usually ran it elevated to work around the lack of a service back then (before it had proper Vista support). Then I switched back to XP once I realized all my framerates in Source games were dropping 67%.

My vote: XP. But I am close to changing it to Ubuntu... Wine and Wine forks are starting to get very good at playing games. Wine runs TF2 great without any noticeable problems. (I should try and get Halo 2 PC to run once DX10 support is in... I bet it would run better than the XP hax0red version).

Concerning the features on vista, such as the windows flip feature, are these actually useful or just resource consuming "ohhs" and "ahhs"? For example, if I had the 3d flip on, and tried tabbing out of a resource consuming game like crysis, would my computer run like **** on a bull trying to run the game in the background and trying to display the 3d flip?

Its things like that, that I wonder about. Useability for lack of a better term. I haven't had a chance to properly sit down for a good month or so with Vista yet, unfortunately. I need a machine that can actually handle it first.

(NOTE: this is all assumed that my hardware is up to spec)

I don't think anyone actually uses the flip thing.

Alt+Tab just works as it normally would.

For you, I vote XP.

Vista.

If you still use XP and have the hardware to run Vista you probably have downs.

I haven't used vista that much. But from my experience with it i don't really dig it. I know you can turn it off, but UAC is a complete pain in the ***, not to mention a joke. I don't really understand why M$ decided to change the GUI all around also. For example, just trying to get to my network settings now takes like 14 clicks instead of 2. That sort of thing makes me

what. UAC isnt a pain.

network settings:

start > network > network and sharing center.


also i should ban you for saying M$

Yeah. I can see what they were trying to do with the network center thing, but it is really just horrendous.

For me most of the UAC complaints I've heard about are from people who insist on always running an admin account instead of a normal account. You're supposed to set up an admin account but not use it and use a normal account instead ... then the UAC only pops up (and asks for your admin account pw) when you're doing something like installing something or you need to run something as admin.

what about whenever you click on somthing another window pops up and says "are you sure you want to run this?". Thats UAC right?

Yes, and its easily turned off.

This almost never happens to me when I run a non-admin account