Actually i believed the Leopard rants weren't justified at all. But in case of Vista, mhmm i don't know man.
Of course if mac users say Vista-64 is better than XP-64 then i guess it must be true.
What i'd like to avoid is Vista eating up all the resources as i heard it's supposedly a chunky OS.
But maybe not?
You've heard but you've never tried Vista yourself. Awesome way to make a decision. All the people telling you that "Vista uses too many resources" know next to nothing about Vista.
In Vista, there is something that's called Superfetch. It basically caches your commonly used programs into memory to make them load faster (XP does not have this). So yes, Vista will use more memory. But read on. When you actually NEED the memory for a program, Vista will release the memory.
In a few ways it's similar to Mac OS X's memory usage.
I've had my laptop on for a few days and I'm downloading a Torrent file.
If I was obsessed with having as much free memory as possible, I would absolutely hate Mac OS X.
Currently, I have 10.4 MB of free memory. Free memory is memory that is not being used and that's available. Free memory is actually wasted memory. It's not doing anything. If you buy 10 gigs of RAM and you only use 1 gig of it, the rest of the memory is wasted.
Right now, I have 1.08 GB of Active memory. Active memory is memory that is being used. Similar to opening up the task manager in XP and adding up the memory of each task being used.
I also have 735.98 MB of Inactive memory. Inactive memory is something that's NOT seen in XP. Inactive memory is in Mac OS X is very much like Superfetch in Vista. Inactive memory is memory that is being occupied by program(s) that AREN'T in use. These programs are loaded into memory so that when you want to use them later, they'll load up quicker (RAM is a lot faster than the hard drive). When a program needs that Inactive memory, Mac OS X releases it. This is how Mac OS X can feel so responsive, even when you have something like 10 MB of RAM left. Vista uses memory in the same way. When you open a program and close it, it's cached into the memory. When that memory is needed, Vista releases it. Hopefully this makes sense.
The reason why people are "hating" Vista so much is because this is a new feature that nobody has ever seen before and many people aren't aware of how it works. I've had Vista crash on me a total of 2 times in the 1.5+ years of using it (I used it when it was in RC1, so it's more like 2 years, and RC1 never crashed on me either, but I didn't use it as my main OS due to lack of drivers). 1 time was a driver issue, and the other time was due to me using extremely buggy alpha software. Much of the early hate for Vista was due to immature drivers (the reason why XP didn't suffer from this is because XP used the same driver model that was used since Windows 98). This had since changed. The drivers are pretty much on par with XP's drivers.
