The thing is Ph30nix, we shouldn't have to.

Dixon's have seen a 2% drop in sales since they stopped selling XP machines.

I know it's Dixon's but still that's a lot for a big company.

I am extremely sorry about the bad describtion this is for gaming! I also was including all variations of XP and Vista. I was being rushed when I made the poll and I really wish that I waited to get more ideas for the thing.

cosmos100, I am aware of that. To be honest I prefer XP overall as I have had much more experience and use with it. There are some things I like about Vista, and some I dont. For example accessing files and manipulating them such as deleting, copying etc is a real pain in Vista, as is installing programs or changing "important System Settings". However, for browsing the net and word processing I much prefer Vista.

So I suppose it really depends on what you are actually doing. The majority of people who come into buy laptops either know nothing, only wanting to do the above mentioned activities, and they are fine with the more simpler laptops. Then there are people who know what sort of hardware they want, eg dedicated graphics on a laptop or build in tv tuner etc.

To me its not really a problem. If you are a hardcore gamer then you can still find copies of XP floating around, but in time (hopefully soon) Vista will take off with DX10 games. Although I was too young to remember what actually took place when XP came in, I can imagine it was very similar as I still have a couple of games laying around that wont run on XP.

I'm sure that somebody will create a crack for DirectX 10 to work on XP.

i think that somebody may have already cracked it, i can't remember where i read it but it might have been TS's front page

OUCH....!

The irony here is that money spent for XP or Vista ends up in the same pocket anyway.

Last months (aptly, nay ironically named) "security updates" for Outlook Express and IE-6 locked my machine out of the internet altogether. Now, that's really secure!!! If you can't connect, you can't be compromised, no one could fault the logic there. However, you just have to wonder what was the reason. It would be all too easy to read a conspiracy theory into it. (I didn't, conspiracy theories give a headache. Moreover, I just automatically assumed incompetence or disinterest on the part of M$ ).
As I thought I read here on TechSpot, M$ is going to sell OEM XP licenses for an extra few months, (past January), due to demand for XP and lack of consumer enthusiasm for Vista. If this isn't so, somebody please tell me, cause I'd like to buy an OEM copy of XP Pro just to save for one of those rainy days you spoke of.

I like having a legit copy of XP because restoring drivers is a pain when you restore every three months. Need a lab of computers for their own seperate functions.

I heard about MSofts vista keys causing people to call back and re-register their product key # so perhaps the Crack has already begun.

Its true about the vista keys. I work in retail and had to call microsoft for a customer to get the activation key because he thought we were selling him a dodgy product.

wow what an angry debates here. have you all seen [URL="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRAUlK8_2VE"]don't give up on vista[/URL] trick? i prefer XP. my boyfriend has vista on his laptop, just because it was already installed when he bought it. and we though, well that's vista, but new things are supposed to be better etc etc. and guess what, it's 5 months now, and we still are not used to using it! i'm not talking about all the technical details, but vista is so inconvenient.

I've been using Vista since Feburary, I don't have any problems using it. I don't know what people are trying to do that find using it hard, sure things aren't always in the exact same spot as XP, but they are there and the help in Vista is actually useful (unlike xp and everything prior) if you can't find something.

I agree, people make to much of a deal about its "so called SUPER loads of problems"

it's not really got that many problems, just that backward compatibility is a bit poor and apparently it's slower than xp sp2, which i would agree with (info from [URL="http://www.techspot.com/news/27986-windows-xp-service-pack-3-offers-performance-boost.html"]here[/URL])

other than that it looks good and some people just find it hard to get used to new things

And when XP came out it was slower than 98se, games were optimized for 98se, ect. What hurts Vista on these forums is the sheer number of members that were less than 12-14 years old when XP came out, so they never had a very established knowledge base of how 98 was and how XP was when it came out.

Ya i agree now never mind.

Well i've done 95-2K upgrades and yeaa even those are a pain in the @$$. The thing is the average pc user will just get lost in vista because the GU-Interface is more advanced. 2K-XP is not a bad leap..But XP-Vista is confusing, esp with dumb pop ups asking for permissions.

Over-all I would stick to XP regardless but eventually im sure to have a Vista machine, it's inevitable.

I like the advanced control of Vista, the only downside is the system resources it can eat. It also seems a lot harder to get malware on vista than xp

You can always shut off the "Aeroglass". This will give you a copy of Vista that works like XP, but nags like a wife.

You can turn off UAC too, then it doesn't nag anymore than XP. And of course it uses more resources than XP, several years of hardware advancements seperate them. If you are that concerned about resources then you don't have a computer that can handle Vista, try Windows 2000 instead.

That's just cold....! (ROTFLOL)

Everyone has a different opinion , I voted for Windows XP but if Mac OSX 10.4 or 10.5 was up there I would definitely wouldn't have voted for XP.