Vista

[squiffy]

Anecdotal . No probs with that. Maybe your hardware is older and not supported properly under Vista yet. (or Vista is not supported by your hardware...)

Hardly "old" hardware. See sig. HTPC has a ATI X300.

 

[lay-z-boy]

I would recommend Vista 64 over XP 64, as any driver for Vista so I read requires to be 64 bit compatible so if your hardware don't work in 64 bit, chance are it wouldn't work in 32 bit either.

I wouldn't recommend XP - it's old, it's gonna be outdated, as 64 bit XP driver support is a nightmare unless you have good solid hardware that's supported.

old, outdated and terrible driver support?

Utter bull.

I have tested masses of external hardware and used it on a huge number of different machines; none of them had a single problem.

Games and system intensive apps perform as well as they do in xp32 or better, much better than they do in vista 9/10.

With sp2 + latest updates it runs rock solid, as reliable as my p3 + nt4 work machine that's been powered on for the last 2 years