I feel so terrrible writing these long posts. But I have a situation that I just can't make up my mind on and I have a hard time making decisions sometimes. That's actually a real long story and I won't dare bother you with it!

I am currently running Windows Xp Pro x64 on an ASUS board that won't run Vista. But the board I had before that, an MSI board will. I had to send it back for repairs after I found out the PCI slots weren't working, but I just got it back.

I've actually swapped out quite a few motherboards in the last month or so, because I found out, the hard way, that two out of three of them were not compatable with Vista.

Anyway, to make a long story short, after I put the ASUS in, and found out it wasn't Vista compatable, I threw Windows XP Pro x64 on it. I must say, I have been real impressed with that OS and it's been a lot of fun to play with.

Now, I also have Vista Basic x64 standing by to install on the MSI if I want to. I've run it before (on the wrong boards) and plan to run again permanently sometime. I just have to decide when to start the process.

See I've done so much swapping and loading of boards and OS's lately, that I'm just plum tuckered out right now! And, I've really grown to like running XP x64.

So, a couple of weeks ago, in order to keep myself from going crazy, I just made up kind of a mission plan, where I said to myself "Ok here's the deal. We've grown kinda fond of XP x64. Lets just go ahead and run it, for say, a year, then will put in the MSI board and Vista and live happily ever after until Microsoft decides to screw something up again. Besides, I thought, it'll be kind of nostalgic, with XP offcially through with support now and everything."

And I have been mostly fine with that decision. However, occasionally the little tech voice inside my head says "Why wait a year? You've got a nice version of the latest operating system. Let's go ahead and slap it all together now and be done with it. Then I can just sit back, relax and try to get, maybe five years out of my system."

Besides I just purchased the Vista and if I run it now, I will have Microsoft support in until September. If I wait a year, I'll be out of support.

So what I need to know from you is, and this might help me decide, are you fairly certain now, that with all the latest updates and everything on it, that Vista has gotten about as stable as it can get? At least for right now?

One reason I ask that, is because, when I do decide to install Vista again, I will run into a slight glitch with SP1. It's happened before, so I know.

What it is, is that after I install SP1, my total amount of RAM listed in System Properties is listed as 16GB's. And in reality I only have 2 GB's, When I had SP1 installed on an earlier configuration a month or so ago, we ran into the same probem. Lucklily after quite a bit of telephone support Microsoft was able to get that to read the correct amount of RAM.

I found out that this happens because of an incompatabilty between SP1 and my onboard RealTek audio. It was easy fix, really at the time, but when I ran into it again on another motherboard, Microsoft was not able to fix it. They may have been able to in time, but I had to send the motherboard it was running on back for repair, so that was that.

I personally believe the reason they couldn't fix it this time was because, the onboard audio was slightly different, though I'm not sure about that. However the last thing that Microsoft said to me, before we had to terminate the incident we were working on, was that they might even be able to do a registry fix, to get rid of that glitch.

So I have no doubt, if I do put Vista on again soon, we should be able to somehow fix that SP1 glitch. And it's really no big deal by showing the wrong amount of RAM. They told me it is not hurting anything. But for me , it's just the principle of the thing.

So when I hear about or run into little things like the SP1 glitch or this or that concerning the current state of Vista, I start thinking back to my original plan of running XP for another year. I figure maybe it'll be even more stable than it is now.

So that's where I need an objective opinion.

Thank you and sorry for the long message.

I went through a similar exercise on a recent custom build but for non-x64 versions. Also, decided to go for a separate audio card instead of what was available on board. Rather than going either/or I chose to build a dual boot PC supported by EasyBCD the 100% free Vista bootloader modification tool (with x64 support):

EasyBCD Documentation Home - NeoSmart Technologies Wiki


My son wanted XP for gaming and I still use XP 60-70% of the time (most of it on my wife's laptop). Decided to go for 2 OEM copies of XP Pro and VISTA Home Premium and add a separate drive for VISTA ($200 incremental cost) so as to temporarily avoid my son having to make his own gaming PC decisions.


I am slowly taking some of my daily routines and transitioning them to Vista and my son also gets to test some of his newest resource intensive games on XP and VISTA on a high-end desktop (previously was mostly using his laptop). WE now get the best of both worlds - plus if one OS gets into problems, we have the other one to go to. It also makes for an easier and less rushed learning curve.