Quote Originally Posted by pevil2000 View Post
I stick to XP. XP works great for me, rarely ever had any problems with it whatsoever, and I don't feel the need to shell out £200+ to get what I already have, plus a whole load of extra resource-hogging.

My flatmate has Vista. 64 bit. And it doesn't seem to work *too* badly. But he gets freeze-ups (despite having quad-core cpu/some 9000 series gfx/4gb RAM) admittedly rarely, but they happen. He gets blue screens. The amount of blue screens he got when he first installed Vista was insane. Not to mention the fact he purchased 64 bit off the shelf... then when he got home found out it was 32 bit in the box and you actually have to send off for the 64 bit version (which won't install now, comes upw ith some error then bluescreens every time he tries) is just a rip off.

Forgive me, but that RAM Vista wants to use is far better put towards playing my games, not playing my OS
Free RAM is RAM wasted. Vista manages its memory in the same manner of Unix, Linux, and BSD. It caches as much as it can in order to boost performance. Its why Vista opens applications nearly instantly and multi-tasks much more fluidly between apps than XP ever did or will do.

Incidentally, here's what your flat mate needs to do. Remove half his RAM and reinstall Vista 64, download the available updates including SP1, then pop back in the second 2GB of RAM. Vista does have its quirks, and this is probably the biggest one.