What about the fact that XP is being discontinued come June 30?
What is more secure?
What is faster?
Please Let Me Know,
TheYankees1903
Vista is more secure. XP is "faster." The older the OS, the less resources it uses. If you wan the fastest OS, go back to MS Dos.
Vista makes better use of your hardware and, while I hate using the word, it's more "future-proof." XP is a 7 year old OS. It's had a great run. If you're using software that has issues with Vista, then I would get XP. But if the software you plan on using works with Vista, I see no reason not to use it. I have it on two computers. My Macbook Pro and my custom built desktop that I built 2 years ago. Service Pack 1 definitely improved Vista and drivers have come a long way. I see no reason why not to use it unless you have software that won't work with it.
Many of the people recommending XP are recommending it because it's all they've ever known their "knowledge" of Vista only comes from what they've read on the internet.
I personally find that program start up time is improved with Vista (thanks to Superfetch which caches your commonly used programs into your memory, but don't worry, if you have a program that needs the RAM, Vista releases it). I also find that the registry is a bit more "robust." With XP, I've noticed, and many others have noticed, that over time, it tends to slow down, even if you run registry cleaners. I have had Vista installed on my desktop since it came out (I installed it a few days after it was released), and have been through numerous drivers, I even installed release candidates of Sp1, uninstalled and installed numerous programs, and I haven't noticed any slow downs over the year I've had it installed. I can't exactly say the same for XP. I've put my Vista install through hell and back. At one point I corrupted the boot loader for Vista while trying to set up a triple boot of XP, Vista, and Ubuntu (friggin Grub was at fault there), and fixing the bootloader for Vista was much easier than doing it for XP. It was pretty much automatic.
If you don't mind, I'll explain a few benefits that Vista has over XP that aren't exactly noticeable to the user on a daily basis.
First of all, the driver model in Vista is vastly improved over that of XP. XP's driver model is pretty darn old. It's the same driver model that is available in Windows 98. This means that driver written for Windows 98 can be used in XP (but it doesn't work the other way around, as there are new features introduced in later OSes). Anyway, in XP, the drivers would work entirely at the kernel level. What this means, is if a driver is poorly written, it has the potential to bring down the entire OS (cause a BSOD, usually with the error message, DRIVER IRQL_LESS_THAN_OR_NOT_EQUAL_TO). In Windows Vista, the new driver model moves much of the driver code out of the kernel into the user land. The little bit that's left in the kernel is there to provide low level functionality, which vastly improves stability. Now, whenever there is a driver error, you don't get a BSOD, you get a error box that tells you a driver has crashed (tells you the driver) and I believe it even tries to reload the driver. You can save all your work and you lose nothing. A game may crash to the desktop, but the entire computer didn't go down.
A full screen 3D application also can run in a windowed mode with very little performance loss. In XP, usually you suffer a large performance penalty for running in a windowed mode. This is due to XP switching between 2D and 3D. XP handled all desktop animations with the CPU, not the video card. So it's basically switching between CPU and video card for on screen rendering. I'm sure, you can understand this can create a performance hit, compared to running in full screen mode at the same resolution. In Vista, the new Driver Model runs everything in 3D. On screen desktop rendering is no longer handled by the CPU, it's handled solely by the video card. So, if you're running a 3D application in Windowed mode, there isn't much of a performance hit.
Hopefully this puts things into perspective. Vista isn't as bad as everyone says, especially people on these forums.
Oh, and the last thing I said about the performance hit of 3D applications in windowed mode in Vista, there is a video at a MS conference that demonstrated this in a very early build of Vista (at the time Longhorn). The driver model in Vista was something that was being worked on for a long time. The build of Longhorn that was used to demonstrate this was build 4074, which I think it was sometime in early 2004 (not to mention they restarted Longhorn shortly after 4074), so it is something that was worked on heavily.
