pros and cons of these OS

[wowfood]

i plan to upgrade my pc when AM3 socket is released, and i'm considering upgrading my OS along with it. So i wanted to ask a few questions

Basically what are the pro's and cons of Vista and Vista 64 (mainly in a gaming context)

also what are the improvements of the above two OS over XP home.

Any info would be great, i'm actually fairly certain that, if i do upgrade i'll be setting the theme to windows classic... I can't stand these fancy bubbly themes xp and vista have. They drive me nuts.

 

[MarcLister]

Hmm I'd recommend searching for Vista threads. There will have been lots of discussion about Vista's gaming performance. Probably pretty good compared to XP and getting better with newer drivers and SP1 as well.

 

[Teki187]

64bit will get my vote.

Safer, faster, more stable, 4gb and up useable.

Oh and future proof, as 32bit will be phased out "eventually"

 

[bledd]

once i get my 7900gt back (or it's replacement from evga) i'll do a comparison of xp64lite vs vista business 64lite in a few benchmarks and games

8gb ram, q6600@3ghz(plus?), and two raptors in raid0

 

[RobH]

I don't mean to hijack but is there much difference between a quad core (eg. q6600) and a dual core (eg. e6600) CPU in Vista x64? I mean for gaming and everyday tasks, not so much number crunching such as video encoding.