It's amazing how many people don't know how to properly organize a start menu in XP and end up with a screen full of menu. Mine is very compact and easy to use. Moreover, if you don't know what you are looking for it's all there in front of you.

With Vista, you click down into folders, realize what you want is not there, and have to click back again - very annoying.

fuzzy, i completely agree with your statement concerning people not knowing how to organize a start menu. actually, i couldn't agree more. however, i dont agree with your opinion of the vista start menu be annoying. to each his own, though. i LOVE raisin pie. chances are, you do not.

as for daton's comment about reduced performance, i can not agree with that at all. i keep a spare hdd sitting in my rig just for xp. i very seldom boot into xp....maybe twice a month. i think vista outperforms xp a great deal.

i repair only rigs i built for clients. i build 3 to 5 each week. that isn't much, i know, but for no advertising other than word-of-mouth, it isn't bad. i'd bet i build more than the 3 computer shops in town, though. anyway, it's a few extra dollars a month for me back to my point: when repairing rigs that have a 'windows problem', i'd say a vast majority of them are xp based rigs. it's not often i get called for a vista related problem. most of the vista related issues are due to the new vista users not knowing where the items they want are now located in vista. usually, it's a control panel item. since vista was released, i've had but one client ask to have vista removed and xp installed. that was due to him not wanting to purchase more than 1 gig of ram. i admit vista needs ram!  (the parts for a new i7 based rig should be here tomorrow. i'm looking forward to building that one! phil may not see it until wednesday evening or thursday morning LOL))

I like lemon. And key lime. And chocolate. IN THAT ORDER!!!!!

Samurye.

For the record when I switched to Vista I actually got better performance except when running DX10 (duh). I waited until last spring and upgraded to 64bit and everything's been smooth going except for some audio driver issues (due to 64bit) and getting use to the gui layouts.

Do you need to switch? Nope. But I've had no serious issues in the past nine months and rarely do I have any crashes and lockups. To be honest, I'm not sure I've even had a bsod, but I certainly haven't been plagued by em.

I has my first BSOD in Vista x64 last night.  I tried to install a free ZIP proggie (7Z, I think it was called) to see if it was any good or not... as soon as I clicked the install button after setup, Vista spat the dummy and went to a BSOD.  It was no biggie, though, I just did a restart and ran ccleaner to remove any entries, etc... all has been fine since.

The only other time I had a BSOD in Vista was in Vista Ultimate 32 bit when I had a faulty graphics card.  However, that was a hardware issue and resolved with a replacement card.

Vista 64 ftw and never looking back. Atleast it's awesome on my computer

I've had Vista since day 1, and i've never had any problems with it.

I'll be the first to admit driver support used to be shaky, and the was an initial performace drop on XP, but now, its stable, I have far less crashes than I did on XP, and the new memory learning features of Vista actually make programs load faster.

I do believe you have to have a system for it. I run, AMD Phenom 9850, 8Gb Ram, GTX 260, so i get fantastic speed on everything. But as an OS I love Vista, and i'll move on to 7 when it's out too.

I see an argument on similar scale to this in the flight sim community, between FS2004 and FSX, but even though the newer program has less support, and more bugs, its the future, and will be improved, whereas the older one will eventually be dropped.

voidcore, i don't consider myself to be an ordinary computer user, either. on my rig, vista outperforms xp hands down. about upgrading rigs to run an os, people had to do it when xp was released, too. it happens every single time a new os is released. the argument of having to upgrade is mute. you always have to do it. if i still had my athlon 3200 with 2 gig of ram, i'd be running xp. actually, that rig is running xp but it's at my daughter's house .

regarding your statement to stay away from vista64.....well, you're wrong. i respect your opinion but i completely disagree with it. 64 bit is the way to go these days. unless you have an ancient piece of hardware like the canon scanner sitting on a shelf in my garage, you'll not have any problems finding drivers. with the price of memory these days, it's fairly cheap to upgrade to 4 and even 8 gigs of ram. heck, the reaper ram i use is on sale for 65 bucks on newegg today. i'm buying 4 sets of it for future use in client rigs.

anyway, some people who have tried vista just weren't happy wioth it and reverted to xp. fuzzy is one of those people. each person has his/her opinion and i respect that. i switched to vista ultimate 64 the day it was released and have not had a single unhappy moment with the os.

64bit have been the way to go for quite a while.. but it have not been mainstream enough and badly supported.. im glad you dont have any problems as it is as you say the future but it will not be a every household thing until some year(s), when we can throw away 32bit completely.. and yes ddr2 is very cheap much cheaper than it have been for ram ever... ddr3 that is the future is not cheap... if you are going the ddr2 way for client rigs today when all new mobos only run ddr3 soon... you are going the wrong way in my opinion ddr2 good for today obsolete tomorrow... i Also switched to vista 64bit when it came and formatted my drive a month later, it may be so that it works alot better now then when it came as it should be... now im on 32bit Vista Ultimate have been for some months and i do feel it is more sluggish and moving large files and unpacking there is a notable differnce, need a RAM uppgrade from my 2GB DDR2 but.. why waste money on DDR2 when im planning on getting a new system with nehalem and ddr3

actually, i have 8.

on a side note, you should see this i7 rig i finished an hour ago. the client may have a difficult time getting me to deliver it tomorrow and i LOVE this Silverstone case!

yeah, i know what ya mean. i have a lian-li v1200b myself. it's a great case. the silverstone ft01-b/w is really a nicely crafted case, too. i've built 2 rigs using that case in the last few days and the more i see it, the more i like it. i like the interior being powder-coated. i can do without the window, tho.