If you purchase XP from Newegg, Tigerdirect etc they offer the express update to Vista when it comes out. Vista allows just as much tweaking as XP, however many items were either renamed or are buried, but you can find them if you look hard enough. Vista offers better stability than XP at the moment....if explorer were to crash for instance, you don't get a bsod, explorer simply restarts ! Security is much improved and as of now most anti virus software works on it like Avast, Spybot, Adaware etc. The built in firewall is actually okay. I also find that of the few games I have loaded on Vista, they do visually look better and play just as well in Vista as they do in XP. If you want to play with the beta of Vista I suggest you put it on another partition and do the dual boot installation, I think you will be pleasantly surprised at Vista. I will also note that driver support for Vista is coming along, and that most items are now either natively supported or have Vista drivers available....even Creative and Logitech (two notoriously horrible for Vista beta support) now have beta drivers which work very well for most of their popular products. You can always upgrade to a DX10 videocard as required, but for now it is unnessessary....a 7600gt would be a good transition card. Or, you can go all out for the 8800gtx ($599) or 8800gts ($450) that are DX10. Both cards blow away any sli or crossfire setup even as individual cards ! And while Vista is just as "peppy" as XP in its latest release, it does require a bit more memory than XP, so, where the sweetspot for XP was 1Gb of ram, for Vista 2Gb will be it. As with any new OS release, it takes a little getting used to, but Vista and Office 12 are imho a definite improvement over XP (and I like XP)...Vista even runs and fully supports everything on my laptop (Toshiba M200) I was able to give all my PP presentations in class (I'm the instructor) using Vista...the students loved it.
