It feels sooooooo good to be back in XP. OEM XP as it comes out of the box is far better than Vista with all the updates. No joke. Vista was sooooooooo slow, annoying (even with UAC turned off), and every one of my games ran at least 10% to 15% slower even with 2GB of RAM.
I tried and tried to get Vista to play nice by shutting off all the new 'features' advertised by Microsoft. Truth is they are not features at all but they are resource hogs. It took 1 hour and 40 min to unzip a 10mb file using Windows native unzip and using the actual Winzip program. Disk indexing was the cause and it is slower than crap. Who cares if you can use the super uber Microsoft search (like anyone uses it)? I don't want something I use maybe 1% of the time to slow my computer down 99% of the time I'm not using it.
I've been buying OS's from MS since DOS 2.10 way back in 1980 and Vista is by far the worst OS they have produced. I have no idea how they shipped it or got it through QA. Do not get me wrong Aero is done very nicely and the GUI is top notch. But underneath all that pretty eye candy is a very unstable, untested, unorganized, unsupported (even a year after release most the drivers for it suck), disaster of an operating system.
I cannot use Vista now since I have 3gb of RAM and I'm still on an AGP rig. the NVidia nv_agp.sys driver does not support more than 2gb of RAM and will blue screen the second it loads. No fixes and NVidia is not making any more drivers for my rig. So I either upgrade or use XP.
In short, Vista is a nightmare and I cannot recommend it to anyone. Too bad Best Buy won't refund my 240 bucks for the thing.
Two thumbs down.