All is well JD and thank you for your concern. I had a power supply go out after I left work and it was down a few days on the XP rig and except for a few power outages due to weather and reboots for updates both run 24/7. Again, TY JD /salute

@David You present good evidence.

I'll stop pleading the "inconclusive" argument.
20% difference in RAC is very significant, and to me, simply amazing ;-)

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Oh, definitely Linux. Ok, ok... the evil penguin made me say that. Short of following that suggestion, I'd go with XP. Vista is going through the same growing pains that XP did in it's youth with Service Packs creating more problems than solutions. (See MS Article #949358). The general vibes I've gotten from the techy circles I go around in is that XP is much preferred over Vista, at least at this point in time.

I built my Quad 6600 last week and installed XP Proffesional 64 bit and i am really pleased with it. I would recommend it.

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With a choice between Vista and XP Professional, for me, the choice is XP Pro -- hands down. Certainly a faster install, and a good 10% faster -- more than that if you can't feed Vista 2G+ of RAM. Configuring Vista to stay out the way takes a fair amount of tweaking and a certain amount of trial and error. Vista has an annoying property when rebooting, to 'protect you' from unknown applications, it blocks BOINC (all versions at this point) from starting -- you have to override the nanny mode to start BOINC (and it will not remember the over-ride so any time you reboot you get to intervene again.

You also have to do tweaks to be able to run ipconfig -- which gets obstructive if you are trying to cope with server issues here which can sometimes be dealt with with an ipconfig /flushdns.

Vista also wants more hardware in terms of video cards (not a big deal if you were already in the higher hardware mode getting something like an 8500GT or 8600 GT with 512M should compensate for the overhead VISTA imposes). If you have older hardware (say an InkJet printer that is more than a year old, or an all-in one printer/scanner of the same 'vintage' you might not get a full featured driver. If you have older software (say something like Office 2000 or Quicken 2005) you might not get full compatibility. Further, if you are connecting to another computer in a home network, data transfer is REALLY SAD.


SP1 for Vista is about to be released and it include a modest set of tweaks which are promised to provide some performance improvement, but, like XP (and Windows 2000 before it), one SP is not likely to be enough. For Win 2000, it took until SP3, with XP, it took until SP2 (SP3 is now available for XP -- SP2 for XP took as long (or longer) to get to as SP3 did for Win 2000). My guess is that with Vista, SP2 *might* clean up enough of the bugs and also provide adequate performance tweaks to make it at least a 50-50 choice as an operating system compared to XP (and by the time SP3 is out, the required hardware will be readily available so that the price penalty drive by the faster hardware will be minor).

I support workstations running Win2K, WinXP and Vista -- so this opinion is based on hands on.

Getting a new pc. which system will work best for crunching?

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My latest came with Vista. It just dragged, and wanted permission to do 'anything'. Task manager? Permission. Hardware manager? Permission. I was used to Win2k, when I said ' do that' and it said ' yes sir!' and did it.

I did finally go to WinXPPro after I formatted Vista off the drive and it seems to be doing ' ok' but Im used to Win2k, so the growing pains are there a little.

Sincerely,
Daysteppr

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I personally think that Vista is an update of Windows ME. I'm sticking with XP Pro, both 32 & 64 bit until 2010 when "Vienna" is due.

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I am not wow'd by Vista. The only reason I had was to use the 64b version on my quad. But I think very little is actually native 64b. So, as it was when we transitioned from 16b to 32b, we all have to wait for the software folks to improve their applications (as well as Microsoft to be more 'native').

One thing that seems to be nice is that Vista supports all of my 4GB of memory. But most of that is consummed by the disk caching in Vista; none of my applications seem to be written to use more than a few hundred MB's of RAM at any one time.

Stick with XP-32b if you can, at least for a year or so.

I am not wow'd by Vista. The only reason I had was to use the 64b version on my quad. But I think very little is actually native 64b. So, as it was when we transitioned from 16b to 32b, we all have to wait for the software folks to improve their applications (as well as Microsoft to be more 'native').

One thing that seems to be nice is that Vista supports all of my 4GB of memory. But most of that is consummed by the disk caching in Vista; none of my applications seem to be written to use more than a few hundred MB's of RAM at any one time.

Stick with XP-32b if you can, at least for a year or so.

If you want 64b on Windows, try XP Pro 64. Works fine for me (no 16b pgms allowed though).