Well I just recently went from Win XP 32-bit to Vista 64-bit and my experience is as follows:
To start off with I was amazed at how good it looked and how fast it installed etc, but setting up my programs and transerring data was a true pain. Some of my hardware (printer and webcam) isn't supported by Vista 64-bit so I had to get shot of them (my printer can print but being an all-in-one printer that wasn't good enough).
Eventually I installed everything (most programs I had to install twice cause Vista kept comign up errors with them, even though it was vista 64-bit software I was installing) I thought *phew* thats it sorted BUT! I was restricted in many ways because I needed the administrators persmission...but I thought I was the administrator? Then I found out that even tho my account was "administrator" I was not THE administrator (an account that is deactivated by default) so I activated that and had to transfer all my data across to this new account.
As I meantioned before installing and uninstalling programs in Vista is a right pain, most of the time it doesn't work and you have to keep re-trying until it does work. The worst program for this was Photoshop CS4 (which was meant to be designed to run on Vista 64-bit, does it ****). Although I was suprised that 32-bit programs aint much of a bother, they seem to install and uninstall pretty happily *thumbs up*.
Even though Vista is on it's first service pack its still buggy, Vista crashes alot with me (including my back-up software which is not good!).
Vista is a bit of a performance hog, tbh when the desktop first loaded when I installed it straight away the sidebar was closed and the theme set to windows classic lol.
Something that's just so basic but it annoys me alot is Vista is viewing a folder, its somehow alot more annoying than it is in XP, XP was just simple and there lol Vista has text and ways of viewing things all over the place. Say I set a folder to view the items as 'tiles' the next time I go into the folder it's on a different view, is it too much to ask for a folder to remember how I want to view my files?
Alot of people praise the search on Windows Vista, well I don't it's annoying as hell, it couldn't even find a file which I KNEW was on my pc somewhere.
Don't get me wrong Vista has some nice features like it makes networking alot easier, as it automaticly connects up to comuters around it on the same network (with a few settings changes here and there). And DirectX 10 is a nice bonus, but I think you can force it to install on XP...
That's all I can think of now, I just needed it out my head lol, I know it's not orginised and my grammar and spelling is bad but i'm a furious Vista owner who wants to move back to XP.
So in conclusion stick with Windows XP, get Windows XP 64-bit if you want the performance increase but id never reccomend Vista to someone.
