In my opinion you should go for windows XP with Service Pack 3 installed. more reliable operating system then Windows Vista, though microsoft released Service Pack for Vista. but still recommend XP as mostly software available in the market are XP supported, new software are coming now with vista supported but with high prices. so see your budget, check your list of software you required to use, then compare prices and decide what should be better.
I say stick with Vista, its compatible with a lot of hardware now (all of mine, and I have an XP only card reader (which works on Linux too though). It uses your CPU more wisely, (less CPU) but a fair bit more RAM. I was comfortably running Vista Ultimate w/Dreamscene on 2GB of DDR2 and a 8500GT video card. I now have 4GB of RAM, and its barely an improvement, just the tiny amounts of lag I was having disappeared. As RectangleMan said, its a lot of hassle to downgrade to XP on a prestocked machine. He also said that Vista offers nothing over XP - more or less true, but XP offers absolutely nothing over Vista. Vista has nice little features you can either switch off or take to your advantage (New start menu etc) and is generally very stable (not one application has crashed in the 2 months I've upgraded) But why bother asking us? We're all opinonated jerks. Go try each one and decide what you like best.
Personally I would buy XP but if your computer allows you to run Vista by all means buy Vista. You can search on the web different articles that will compare the two.
I'd have to disagree. Hardware/Driver developers are developing for XP and Vista. Not doing so would be catastrophic at this point as XP is still widely used.
I have used every Microsoft OS and NOS and linux, novell, mac and I got to say Vista is perfectly fine. I also have to say that everybody who post negative comments on vista are: 1. Uneducated or Uncertified with computers 2. Jealous their computer can not run it 3. Never used it and state, "what they heard" Go dig a hole and throw yourself in it.
GO DIG A HOLE AND THROW YOURSELF IN IT. not a good idea. and after using linux and mac if some one says VISTA is perfectly fine... i can just read three points in some other way. well i have Intel Coure 2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40 GHZ with 2 GB RAM, i test Windows Vista and fine it perfect, there is no doubt in this, but if you compare it with linux or mac, please don't say it perfect. and yes if a guy have a system which can easily handle vista, go for it as i said earlier, just see your budget first before purchasing VISTA, because you need to spend money on it, buying a High Class CPU if your current is not and also buy a big priced volume software for VISTA. so for normal user i recommended XP, not saying VISTA is not good idea.
What? Never heard of this. Back to the question posed in the first place, it depends on what you want. Many prefer Vista, but then again many prefer XP. Many still prefer several other OS'. Really for the time being Vista and XP have support for almost the exact same everything. It's really personal opinion...
Vista's a fine OS. I personally don't use it all the time on my computer though. At the moment I'm running Ubuntu 8.10 Alpha 6 as my main OS, with Windows XP running in VirtualBox, and this works pretty well for me most of the time (Use Ubuntu for web development, XP for .NET development). I do however have Vista installed on a partition that I boot into if I want to either play some games that don't co-operate too well with WINE on Ubuntu or if I just feeling like sitting back and chillin' while I watch some videos using Windows Media Center.
XP, no questions...My wife has Vista and a loooots of bugs: IE shutting down at anytime for some reason, copy and paste freezing all the time...and she get 3gig ram and dual processor. I have a 8 y/o laptop with 512Mb and XP. Working much better and faster...