[spectralkinesis]

Vista. It's an evolutionary change to the OS.

I run Vista x64 Ultimate. I have a fast processor. I have 8GB RAM recognized by my Operating System cos I'm not stuck in a 32-bit address space.

Yeah, the frontend doesn't look all that different. Whoop de doo I can see through the borders of my windows and shit.

Vista is a revolutionary technology-based OS release. It is meant to provide a solid base for advanced technologies dealing with system functions not readily visible to the user. The audio, print, display and networking subsystems have been completely restructured. These back-end changes actually are revolutionary, but are only visible to software developers.

Vista uses memory in a very different way from XP. Vista will store program information in system memory based on learned user usage patterns - analyzing user patterns via machine learning - so that those programs load and operate faster on subsequent runs.

Security has been improved via: User Account Control, more privilege-restriction techniques, anti-process-DLL-injection integrity, improvements in Windows Firewall - filtering *both* inbound and outbound traffic, Windows Service security restrictions are finer-grained, and address-space layout randomization.

The Aero UI is only an evolutionary change. Ask anyone that runs Windowblinds or has haxed UXTheme.dll on XP. Skining the operating system and using transparency has been feasible for a while now.

In closing I'd like to say STFU if you haven't run Vista for at least a little while on a decent machine before answering the "Vista or XP" question.