shoudl i dual boot vista 64 and xp?

Should I dual boot Vista 64bit AND Vista 32bit, or Vista 64bit and Xp 32?

Only if you have an old program that won't run on Vista.

Vista x64 and XP x32. Game on XP for now and Vista for web surfing,etc. DX10 is just BS right now.

I've had a lot of issues with the Adobe CS3 products and Vista using Aero, so if you do any graphic stuff I'd recommend doing that in XP.

Maybe by the time Microsoft releases its next OS Vista will be more reliable.

Vista 64 is more mature now. I can run any XP software in Vista 64. Just get all patches, drivers, etc.

I don't think I've had any problems with programs running in Vista x64. I had a few driver issues in the beginning, but those have all been worked out at this point. You'd be fine with Vista x64.

Save money on the extra ram needed to make Vista run -close- to XP and have all your programs run better than Vista...by just not using Vista.

I have 2gb atm and it runs great. I mthinking of going to 3gb. but w\e ill see what i want to do later, t hx for the info.

That just doesn't "jive" with real world benchmarks. That's not a knock on Vista, every new MS OS has been slower than it's predecessor on the same hardware. It's like having a 15 year old kid and a 8 year old kid and asking :which one is better at baseball ?" The older kid's body is more mature, he has had more experience, and he is undoubtedly stronger and faster. That doesn't mean I hate 8 year old kids and it doesn't mean that the 15 year old kid was a better baseball player when he was 8 years old than this 8 year old is.

Usually each new OS gave us something that made the trade off worthwhile. With Win2k for me it was "hot docking w/ laptops" for example.....otherwise I woulda stayed with NT4. Vista doesn't have that killer feature that makes people wanna take the performance hit.

One can easily look up the benchmarks and see that there is quite a notable difference on same hardware. The most recent post SP1 benchmarks I have seen showed XP SP3 finished a set of Windows benchmarks twice as fast as Vista. AT 2 GB, Vista picked up about 4 %.

http://www.neowin.net/news/main/07 [...] -sp1-again

Really nothing has changed since this has been written....

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/0 [...] dows_vista

whatever gain Vista picked up w/ SP1 was erased by XP's SP3.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=1332&page=6

"So, onto conclusions. Looking at the data there’s only one conclusion that can be drawn - Windows XP SP2 is faster than Windows Vista SP1. End of story. Out of the fifteen tests carried out, XP SP2 beat Vista SP1 in eleven, Vista SP1 beat XP SP2 in two of the tests, and two of the tests resulted in a draw."

With MS offering two OS's for the price of one, I';d use a boot manger to hide one of the two installed OS's with say XP on a 16 GB C1:\ and Vista 64 on C2:\. I put a common swap and temp file partition on D:\ and then arrange the rest as works for the individual user. Then when Vista hits SP3 or more programs are written for 64 bit, ya can just wipe C1:\

Of course if you see no real difference between one and the other, at any point in time, you can wipe XP with no real loss since you didn't pay for it.