Is it really that problematic?

I figured that I wanted my new machine to be as upgradeable as possible. I'll need vista 64 if I ever want to upgrade the ram to more than 4 gigs wont I?

If you get proper drivers for your hardware it shouldnt be any problems.

I have been using 64bit OS for the last few years and no major issues so far.

A lot of people just jumped on the Vista-hating bandwagon, I think. The collective hive-mind hatred for it made me slightly apprehensive. Since then, however, I've been using Vista 64, and haven't had a single problem with it.

Must still be some reservations about vista judging by this.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7370821.stm

I have nothing against vista i just prefer xp.
I know numerous people who have downgraded to xp after buying new pcs and in a business environment i wouldn't even start to consider it yet. 3rd party software support still seems very sketchy.
Since the first SP is out now i'd imagine most of the headaches are pretty much fixed but 64bit had a bad rep for being difficult to get working with all your hardware and software. I guess it depends on what you're running, games and standard programs fine, you wanna to run cad/cam with plotters and mills

Yeah there's definitely reservations about vista for some people I'm personally not buying into it though. It was the same when XP came out. Then 6 months down the line you'd be ridiculed if you still had 98 2nd edition on your system.

Admittedly the resistance to Vista is a bit more extreme than it was for XP but I think most of that is due to the fact that it needs a lot more cpu power and ram to run smoothly. Plus a lot of machines built to run XP were "upgraded" with Vista which made them really slow and clunky. (I have a friend that got caught out like that. Bought a sony laptop that only had 512 ram and 1 of the 1st gen dual core's. It takes about 5 minutes to boot up)

The fact of the matter is we'll all be using Vista sooner or later, like it or not.

Good to hear you've had no problems with 64 bit Tobster n Gash. I hadn't met anyone that's using it yet so that's put my mind at ease.

You could go insane and spend about a thousand quid on two 9800GX2's and put 'em in SLI. I saw a benchmark vid that managed to get Crysis running on very high at 80 fps with a res of 1920x1200.

Thats just silly money for gfx cards though.

If Microsoft are trying to force us into abandoning XP as some websites claim, then why are they bothering to release Service Pack 3 for it tomorrow? Windows XP Service Pack 3 is already available to Technet and MSDN users and the full public release is on 29 April. Doesn't sound much like they have abandoned it to me.

I actually had less problems with the 64-bit version of Vista than with the 32-bit one. The problems I was experiencing when using 32-bit were mainly memory-related, though. All of them cleared up once I upgraded to 64-bit which I was quite happy about, since, like most, I was expecting to run into even more.

I bought a new 24" iMac yesterday. Took it home on the bus and did not get mugged. It is awesome and even though the GPU is not the best there is it should be enough for TF2, Age of Conan, L4D and Spore!

My Win XP Pro does not arrive until Wednesday though so I probably wont play anything on it until Thursday

(Any derogatory remarks from Slash will be deleted)