What operating system should I get?

Yup i know what you mean; difficult to comprehend that fear; or perhaps we are bit more adventurous than others with little to no fear of trying things out just for the sake it.

That sounds about right,been using 7 since last year march\april.

Cool; about couple months more for me; and as I said in one of earlier posts somewhere; I never had any problems with either vista/7 ...... call it luck or may be because I tend not to overclock my PCs hence I run into lot less hardware related issues/failures. Infact since 1991; luckily only one HDD, and one motherboard (during P3 days) has died on me

The only problem i have had with any OS,is that i try different tweaks.
So the problem is me,now how do i get rid of the problem?:haha:

Would the different themes effect computer performance, in 7?

Or would they all be the same?

thanks

If you are using themes from MS i see no issues with performance; however if you are using some 3rd party solutions like windowblinds etc. you better be prepared to make sacrifices with regard to performance.

Changing to a Classic theme (without the Areo effects) will reduce memory and processor utilization slightly and could be beneficial particularly if you have an older video card. It won't change any of the underlying system or driver performance though. Gaming performance shown in the review link that i sent really shouldn't change much at all.

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/windows_7_gaming/page12.asp

Ultimately whether you notice a difference or not is going to be based on your system specs, and what you are using it for. But it certainly won't hurt performance. You can turn down some of the visual settings in XP as well, but i never bothered and won't bother on Win 7 either as i don't find it makes an appreciable difference.

Even if it did i'm guessing it would be something like 1-2% range ... what's your opinion in this regard comp?

It is really going to depend on your GPU, and exactly what settings you pick, I have seen some conflicting reports that disabling Areo can actually decrease system performance slightly as it may decrease the overall resource usage and computation, but that it shifts more to the CPU rather then the GPU. I couldn't find hard data on the topic, but from the way windows ships their systems (without Areo enabled for the basic editions) i would think otherwise. Generally though i would agree with the 1-2% max performance difference - and only when you are moving a lot of windows around or something. There are much better ways to get 1-2% performance anyway, and worrying about windows theme settings is being penny wise, but pound foolish. Unless you have a very very good reason why it is an issue, i wouldn't bother messing with them.

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?lc=en&dlc=en&cc=us&docname=c00815926

has good general recommendations for improving system performance (technically vista, but applies to win7 as well). Included in this list are not using the sidebar, setting visual effects to best performance vs best appearance, and disabling Areo.

Note that Areo and/or visual performance settings won't make a bit of difference in gaming as they are all disabled (caveat - they may reduce RAM usage slightly, but if you are running out or RAM while gaming you have other issues).

Thats a fair comment; I've never really understood why people complain about it too much; I think on newer generation Intel onboard graphics solutions the performance hit will be about same; as these are bit more nearer to performance levels of nVidia 9200 now. And I have my DV5-1125 with Geforce 9200GS (256mb DDR3) ... and disabling Aero or enabling it just doesn't make any visible/or tangible difference.

Or you have graphics card issues

And thats a good reference for anyone who want to reduce there startup footprint/make system bit more responsive.