I don't know about other operating systems, but with 3 years of development on top of XP means its got to be better that Windows XP. But seriously DirectX10 and greater security makes it better that Windows XP. Just it needs tons of resources, 1GB ram just for the os never mind the additional ram required for your apps and games
well rams have got cheaper over the time. But does anyone really like vista? I never tried it though.
I like having DirectX 10 support, but to be honest there's only a handful of games that use it, and even less that REQUIRE it at the moment. Beyond that, Vista seems a little smoother on Dual Core systems than XP was, but not enough to make me think it's worth upgrading just yet.
Vista might not be that good now but over time it will grow. It will get software and hardware features that are not available in earlier micro$oft operating systems. Thats how m$ has always worked make new os and gradually discontune support and features for olders os.
There is some unofficial work being done on converting DirectX 10 over to XP. If it succeeds, Vista will lose a major selling point.
Vista doesn't offer anything truly proprietary that the other OSes don't currently possess. It's just Windows XP + better branding. Windows XP with some security applications trump Windows Vista.
In my experience vista is awful. Compared to XP much slower, awful start menu (although you can revert to the older one) and it takes too long to do simple tasks sometimes.
Vista has direct x 10 and is visually stunning. But I'll hold off upgrading yet until they release their service pack 1.
well as per my experience vista is better than xp due to high security and awesome graphics , but it consumes a lot of resources like 1GB ram.
one more thing i just faced today. vista doesnt allow you run visual studio 2002 or 2003. kind of making it difficult for programmers maintain the old code.
I am running Vista Ultimate with Office 2007 and Expressions. together the system has been very stable. I have 1 gig of memory in the sytem and I have not had any problems. I am also running the 32 bit operating system. The biggest problem that I am running into is the lack of support for what are now legacy items I have attached to my system. Security is much improved it seems, and it has an ability to be tweaked at a very granular level, but to get there takes some research. On the downside I have noticed that there are frequent "sleep" periods when steppping away from the system even when power settings are tweaked. The back up and shadow feature are very good and in the long run can save many hours of fixing mistakes. But IMHO PCDos was the best....