1. They all run the same kernel. The best performing would be the one with the lowest overhead, so basic. I've been running a trail version of Server 2k8 which is built on the same kernel and it's significantly faster then Vista Ultimate. Both were 64 bit versions with 4GB of RAM.

2. Yes. But interprocess depenancy seems to be worse so you can't go down to as few running processes.

3. don't know. Call Microsoft and ask.

4. If you don't have 4GB of RAM save yourself the headache of software compatibility issues and use the 32 bit OS.

5. No, MWLL runs equally well under either DirectX environment. There's more to this but I'm not even gonna drop any hints.

Hey Toeball,

Is the animation on your avatar from the Mod? It looks awesome!

To be honest... I tried Vista for 6 months, sold the laptop it was on, bought a mac, and haven't looked back since. I'll keep XP Pro 64-bit on my gaming desktop just for games but for everything else my MacBook Pro does the trick. In my mind DX10 just isn't worth dealing with the piece of crap that is Vista. Other may feel differently but that is just my opinion.

Photoshop CS3 Load Time on Vista = 1 minute 32 seconds
Photoshop CS3 Load Time on OSX 10.5 = 7 seconds

Same CPU clock speed & same amount of RAM... You do the math...

I have been using Vista Ultimate 64-bit for a while now.  After gutting all the bullshit processes that are on by default I find it much more responsive now.  Having 8GB of RAM is nice and there is noticeable performance improvements when using multiple applications.  Much of what makes Vista so damned clunky are the "features" that Microsoft touts as improvements.  The two biggest killers in my experience were the prefetch (Superfetch) and Indexing services.  Once those bastards were killed my systems have improved dramatically.

On a side note, having 8GB does allow for some interesting possibilities.  I have used a small application to take a 2GB slice of RAM and turn it into a virtual disk.  Pointing Photoshop to that space for its scratch disk does wonders.

Im in the exact same boat as Panzer. After clearing all the nonsense out it actually runs pretty well. I find that multiple processes run con-currently sp? much faster than on my xp pro 64.

Waiting on Windows 7...

The problem with "cleaning vista out" is that you lose security features. For example, to get all those annoying pop ups from coming up every time you click on something, you have to disable the user account security. Thus, making your PC much less secure. Vista is just a bad OS.

I am not saying this because I like OSX or think it is cool to hate Microsoft. It is simply the truth. I loved Vista for about a week. It looked cool and was new and different. But then after installing some programs and watching my performance go to the gutter, I couldn't stand it. Now I use a Mac with OSX 10.5 on it. I have a cool, new looking, shiny OS that is a hell of a lot more secure and runs a hell of a lot better. I hesitated to make the change thinking that as a software engineer I wouldn't be able to use the Mac to do all the things I needed to do for my job. Now that I have had it for 4 months I realize that it was a completely unsubstantiated thought. I can do everything I need to do and more.

The tables have turned and times have changed. I will bet that we will continue to see Apple take more and more market share from Windows over the next decade. I will bet that we will see more and more games ported to and written for Mac and OpenGL.

My advice to you? Buy a mac... use OSX for all your daily activities like surfing the net, downloading porn, office work, school work, etc. Run Windows XP Pro SP3 in Bootcamp (basically making your mac a dual boot machine) to play games on. Thus, you get the security, features, and performance of OSX but also keep the ability to play games on WinXP. Or run Vista in bootcamp so you get DX10 for your games... just don't use the vista partition for anything else.

Just my .02.