I’ve been well weary of Microsoft’s newest iteration of Windows as Vista, and have refused to install it on any of my personal machines. Recently, I rebuilt a system for my cousin that consisted of an AMD Athlon 64 x2 4800+, 4GB ram, and sported a GeForce 8600 256MB video card. I thought that such a system would surely handle Vista with ease.

However, after installing the behemoth of an OS, I was disappointed to note that Windows felt somewhat sluggish (like XP on a system with a quarter of the specs of this one) and games didn’t perform exceptionally well. The tremendous amount of overhead introduced by the “security” features (ahem, security for Hollywood, not you) and other new crustola found in Vista are simply not worth the flashy visuals and mediocre (at best) improvements to the OS.

Stick with XP. Bottom line, if you really want something shiny and new, give OSX or Linux a shot. Otherwise, XP is still the king (and if you have a 64 bit processor and a lot of ram, you can find XP x64 edition… that’s what I run).