I finally got around to seting up my PC as a dual boot with XP and Vista. I have two hard drives so it was pretty easy. Hunting down all the XP versions of my drivers was the hardest part, but anyhoo.. XP is smoking. I'm keeping her lean, no background apps that are not 100% nessecary. It is my gaming boot. All that other crap I'm keeping on the Vista side. I've tried Armed Assault, S.T.A.L.K.E.R. SoC, and Supreme Commander. The performance increase has been huge for ArmA and SupCom, but not noticable for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (I suspect something is borked for S.T.A.L.K.E.R. though, as it used to run well with full dynamic lighting, and now I have to play it with static lighting. Must be drivers or something. Makes no difference except in the underground areas, which all look much lighter and less scarey). Having 2gig of RAM is a minimum for a gaming Vista machine, but with XP that extra gig is a bonus. Faster load times abound. And the actuall OS snaps open like a jack-in-the-box. But best of all? I can play Dungeon Keeper 2 without it crashing every thirty seconds. w00t!
I've made vista run almost as smoothly as XP if you remove/uninstall/slay the crappy aero and other fancy features. However, its a lot of work just to get a workable OS. Unless you want to run the latest games at max graphics (i.e. need 3+ GB ram and DX10) then XP is just fine.
64bit? .-. Wonder why we haven't really made a big leap already into (standard) 64bit O/S? oh wellz, ol'32 continues to live. Running Vista basic(cuzimcheap) with 3gigs.. Had a nightmare time last year(that bs uac was the reason).. but seems to be doing alright now... just too lazy to go back to XP hehe. Does what I want it to (most of the time). So no real rush to change back. Just keep doing your job.
Depends on how much you use. i have about 750GB total space, 1 500gb 1 250gb on this PC My other PC has about 100GB total. I need a terabyte drive though, lotta music on here.
pfft, 1Tb here :p having got my x64 vista ultimate, i couldnt go back to XP, xp was horrible looking no problems with it, and with my hardware performance problems are non-exsistant
I downloaded the media center theme for my XP computer. It looks much nicer then the standard (It's still blue!)
I prefer XP because it wasn't half-finished when it was released, and it is compatible with old games. Otherwise, I have no clue which is better.
Vista, I'm gay for aero. Got 6gb ram, so 64bit version, having major problems with some applications, all in all, I enjoy living on the edge.
Heres a simple analogy why 4gb of ram will never show, and be downsized to (3.5gb or less). "Let's say you have a 4 oz glass for mixing a drink & the drink you're making MUST consist of juice, vodka & ice. If you fill the glass with 4 oz of juice, there's obviously no room for the vodka & ice. But since you MUST use ALL of these components to make the drink, you'll have to sacrifice some of that 4 oz of juice to make room for the rest of ingredients." 4 oz glass = 4GB of virtual address space (VAS) for 32-bit OS 4 oz juice = 4GB of RAM vodka & ice = video card & other components that MUST be mapped to the VAS.