general nature of windos Vista- Home premium

heres what i do with my xp machine- which ive had for a 3 years or so (socket 754). I regularly run virus- ***ware checks, registry edit, defrags, and other things designed to increase stabilty and performance... I take good care of it, and generally i dont have any real problems.. occaisonly it will freeze if i try to open google.
I am considering buying a gaming desktop that i can upgrade in the future and that is kind of on the cutting edge/fore front of the arms- i mean technology race. it comes with windows vista Home premium.
so if i do what i do with xp on a regular basis- defrag, registry clean, antivirus and ***ware, and update should i have any problems with vista?
the other thing is, Im wanting to branch out and start doing some minor video and photo editing, and family dvd making. on its basic level, would vista premium come with things i could do that with some degree of ease.

if it helps, my computer specs will be :
Intel Core 2 Q6600 Quad-Core (8MB L2 cache,2.40GHz,1066FSB)
Operating System Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium
Memory 2GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 800MHz - 2 DIMMs
Video Card nVidia GeForce 8800 GT 512MB
Hard Drive 320GB - 7200RPM, SATA 3.0Gb/s, 16MB Cache

last question, is theere a way to make vista look like xp generally speaking- and make it so it doesnt need to eat the hardware up?
Thanks

 

Vista Home Premium gives me no problems at all - I use the x64 bit version, and it finds drivers much easier than XP ever did.
It should run quite well on your proposed system, - The graphics card will be good for it - Always better with 4gb memory (while its cheap)- It reserves graphics memory, so if your graphics card has 512mb the it will show your 2gb as 1.512gb, or, even less.You can workaround to stop it, but not always the best idea.
You can also turn of the aero style graphics, and the UAC , if you desire - the new system is overly - do you want to allow this - phobic.

 

cool. I hear all these complaints against Vista, but i wonder how many know enough to do weekly cleanups and updates. and I wonder how many are just every day users vs how many go on just to find bugs. I was always told- you can find wrong and evil anywhere if you look hard enough.

I will eventually upgrade different parts- the processor should be fine for a respectable amount of time. The ram will be updated first. followed by either going SLI on 2/512s, or investing in single or SLI 1 gigs.

Its not designed to run everything at 2400x1200 but i think it should do very well in benchmarks, COD4, UTIII, etc. I dont care much for crysis so that solves a few things right there

 

Don't forget to take expectations into account. If the user honestly thinks it will be just like XP, with more shiny graphics, they won't manage to go more than a minute before the nasty surprises start to happen.

 

Im gonna frame that comment and hang it up on my wall.

Bravo!

 

yea so far ive managed to avoid that trap. there are definately some distances beyond the purty colors.
(maybe if i could get a "XP" theme for it?)

 

You could...

I found XP's theme nauseating.

 

so you like vistas better.. i could see that.

course as of yet, ive spent no more than an hour with vista- and how knows many hours with xp/..

ive heard that software developers will soon start to stop making software for xp. as in to use this software you must have xp (halo 2 for instance)

 

Halo 2 was made for Vista, not for XP, and it runs just fine under the OS it was developed for.

 

just noticed my typo there

 

I have not tried this, as I use both Vista and XP, and like them both as they are - I have done the Vista lookake for XP, and that does not like SP3, so I cannot vouch for this- I might try it in a few days, on a sepoerate Vista partition.
http://shifty102.deviantart.com/art/XP-s-Luna-theme-for-Vista-58027692?offset=90#comments
By Erik van de Velde (Shifty102)
Worth a read through the comments, if you really want to consider changing the theme.

Also I noticed this earlier majorgeeks thread, on the same subjeect-
http://forums.majorgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=150891