XP is the good ol' trusty OS now, we've had years of tweaking and tuning it to how we like it, and are able to extract better performance from it. But it's still got it's flaws.
Vista is fresh, and tricky, but it is fairly stable. And it's a lot better now than when it was first released, at least for my application. I've become used to Vista and it will eventually be in the same arena with XP as far as what we can and will do with it. Once we can make the OS work for us and how we want it to, there'll be less griping. MS just decided to make it harder to do.
As far as which is better, that depends on application and what you want to get out of your PC. They are all too similar, but I think MS did that to make people switching over still feel comfortable I suppose. I like Xp Pro and I like Vista Ultimate, but I do lose resources and performance using Vista. That's more by the OS's design and nature. But with these newer PC's, it'll be a smaller and smaller difference as time and drivers go on, and in the end it'll come down to trying both and deciding which one works best for you. We can all give opinions, and with OS prices it's not necessarily worth it to dump a bunch of money into a couple of different OS's.
Personally I'm gonna stick with Vista and fight it and make it work for me, and in due time SP1 should be out, better drivers and support, and once I disabled that UAC feature, Vista was much more enjoyable since I didn't have to allow every little thing. Vista is a challenge, but like anything, once you get it running to how you like it, that's all that matters. But if you go with something new, be ready for challenges. If you're not ready, stick with what you know until you are ready for that jump.
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