I bought a new notebook with VISTA Home Premium on it & am sort of facing the VISTA vs XP issue too.
In your case, though, you have much better hardware & VISTA should run quite well. So far as I see it the big thing in favor of VISTA is that with time, VISTA is becoming more while XP will be becoming less. (Although it is just possible that current VISTA could turn out to go the way of WINME. That is, it may turn out that the best strategy would be to use XP until WIN 7 is available.) However, in general, it has shown to be a tactical advantage (in our technological oriented society) to be knowlegeable in the leading software & hardware.
A major issue I have with VISTA is that some of my old software (including utilities) dont work with it. It appears that I need to purchase an update of True Image or Partition Commander in addition to NERO. So far these are the programs I know about. I suspect that my ROXIO Creator will have to be replaced too & Im wondering about my Adobe PE as well as a myrid of programs & utilities I have for use with my XP machines (& which I have not attempted to install yet). Also the notebook (with 2GB ram, 200GB HDD, & 2Ghz Core 2 Dual feels to struggle a bit when using VISTA but not when using XP. (The notebook does have the 965GM IGP though which is no doubt its weakest link.)
So the bottom line is to stay with VISTA unless:
- You learn after using it that you cant stomach it (for myrid of possible reasons some unique to your personna)
- Your unwilling to buy the needed compatible software to replace the "must have" functionality associated with older now incompatible software
However, if you are successful in implementing dual boot then the second bullet will not be a great problem but be more sort of a nuisance although Ive seen an implementation that allows XP to be run from the VISTA desktop which sounds interesting.
All-in-all I think that MS could have done a better job. VISTA was pushed out the door a year too soon as (& I can vouch for this from 1st hand experience) it really didnt run well in the previous vintage notebooks (ie, 945 chipset with 1G ram typical) plus there were the various other issues such as driver availability, bugs & software backwards compatibility, etc. A lot of people got a bad taste in their mouths as a result. Working with VISTA, I can think of a bunch of improvements which could have made it more likable (eg, auto sizing window screens to fit the data versus just plopping a huge mostly empty window
on the desktop just because the space is available; the same goes for the sidebar - on my system it is not autosized & it takes this slice off the end of the screen if there is only one item in it (happens if aeroglass becomes disabled); provision should have been made to allow for selection of the sophistication of graphical objects [eg, sidebar clock graphic is rather crude] along with providing more varied selection [eg, different time display types such as digital, digital stopwatch, etc.] - are we to be sold this as VISTA Plus? )
Anyway, just my two cents.
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