Is Vista ready for primetime...or just downgrade my new laptop to XP Pro?

This is really a personal choice. There are a lot of articles that address this topic including a pretty good one in the current issue of Maximum PC magazine.

As a rule of thumb Vista needs a minimum of 2GB of RAM to run smoothly and preferably 3 or 4GB. XP seems to run pretty smooth with up to 2GB and doesn't benefit as much from more than that unless you like to open a lot of apps simultaneously. Ready boost is an option you can use in Vista to compensate for less ram but I haven't personally tested it. You have 3GB so it's not an issue.

I've used both XP and Vista extensively and find advantages and disadvantages in both. I prefer Vista for general computing work because it tends to be more responsive and smoother as long as you have plenty of RAM and a dual core CPU.

I installed XP on my brand new notebook however because in the end I still prefer XP. I still encounter frequent incompatibilities with Vista and some of my software and both of my printers. Pretty much all applications will run faster or as fast in XP. Vista drivers are maturing but most games and productivity software will still squeak out a few percent more performance in XP.

If you already feel skeptical about Vista you may do yourself a favor and just skip it because you will certainly find much about it that annoys you if you're looking for it.

I have vista 64, do you think xp pro is faster?

System Specs
2.2 ghz Dual Core
3 gigs of Ram
Geforce 8600

I have OEM Vista Home Basic SP1 and upgraded to Ultimate SP1 and i love it. Who says it needs 2GB RAM? After my optimization it uses only 36% of the RAM shown on task manager. You only need 2GB RAM if you do gaming because that can use up to 70% RAM which is excess 50% (1GB). Rest are on pagefile.

The performance with Aero works really smooth even on the low end GMA X3100 as far i see. Anyone have dedicated card should able run it extremely well. There's no such thing as "slow down on gaming" that are just sick rumors. There might be few fps slowdowns but is not something you'll even notice.

Everyone complains Vista uses alot resources that is true because the "Early Prefetch feature" loads windows apps into the RAM so when user wants to run it the program can be launch instanly without loading all required DLLs files resulting faster access, also known as 'much more responsive'. You can see a clean install of XP uses no more then 100MB RAM but Vista takes up to 800MB. I was very concern about this but after a while i see there's no performane impact with other RAM resource hungry apps.

Hardware issues i have nothing more to say but stick with the hardwares from 2008 is the best way to aviod compatibility issue. If you own Intel CPU, Chipset and a nVidia/ATI graphic card you're prime and good to go with Vista. One thing i sticked with vista from now is the fancy GUI and the new kernel and revised file system.

@Baskir, Work best if you have 4GB RAM, the same 32bit app on 64bit tend to use more RAM. Resulting better have more RAM.

It is all depending on what apps you are running, and what your OS previously was. Matter of persoanl preferences and the willingness to go forward will determine what OS is "faster" (?)

cheers ...

Like what others have said, OS choice boils down to application usage. For gaming XP has the advantage of less resource usage and generally more stable gameplay, especially with older gaming.

General computer usage runs fine with vista but i see no point in getting a 64 bit version unless you are running 4g+ of ram.