XP Pro 64 has a lot of issues with running apps, and with the availability of Vista, XP64 really isn't a viable alternative to most users.

While there is a lot of fuss about Vista, it's not nearly as bad as it's made out to be. A lot of the complaints are from people who are trying to run it on systems that don't have the recommended specs or who tried to install it as an "upgrade" to older versions of Windows. If you try to do an upgrade, you will get some freaky problems, but if you do a clean install, things are much different.

As for eating up memory, it only takes a few adjustments to turn off those extra things in Vista that do so. There are claims that Windows 7 will have a smaller memory footprint, but all of the independent benchmark tests that I have seen comparing the latest build of 7 to Vista suggest this really isn't the case. The kernel for 7 is taking up about the same, perhaps a little more RAM than Vista.

I'm not going to go on a praise Vista thing here, because there are many things about the OS that could be a lot better. However, even if 7 is out sometime this summer, I don't really think it's going to be smoothed out for another year. That's why I went ahead and bought a Vista machine, and I have absolutely no regrets. I've used quite a number of operating systems - yes, even Linux distros, Mac, Amiga, DOS, GeoWorks, OS/2, UNIX, and so on - and Vista just isn't the demon that people make it out to be. People like to hate on Microsoft, whatever. Again, Vista isn't as great as it could be, but it's not a bad decision to invest in it now. The waiting game for a stable version of 7 is fine if you want to wait 1.5 years - and that's even if the initial release is just 6 months down the line. That is one thing that I will agree with the crowd about on MS - it does normally take them about a year to come out with all the patches and whatnot to calm a new OS down. That's where Vista is today - WAY better than it was when first released.