Vista Ultimate or XP Pro?

Ok, so.. i've recently been attacked by a rootkit trojan and now have to reinstall my OS, though I have the option to reinstall XP Pro again or Vista Ultimate.


My hardware:

Athlon 64X2 5200
Radeon HD2600
Win XP Pro - [dead]
3gb ddr2 pc 4200
A8M2N-LA mobo (NodusM3-GL8E) - sad times.. need to upgrade mobo

in the next few months I'm looking into getting a new mobo and geforce 9800/285gtx as well as upgrading my ram*

*currently two 1gb sticks of corsair (2gb) and two 512mb stock sticks.

is it worth upgrading to Ultimate for me? Or should I stick with XP Pro until W7?

I'm a gamer. I see no, not even marginal, difference in DX9 - DX10. I run a lot of old (OLD - Win95/98) games and spend a lot of my time video editing, and modeling (Maya etc).

Other than that, I see no purpose in upgrading to Ultimate other than my hardware upgrades down the line.

I don't know the ins and outs of Vista, or really any OS for that matter. All I know is that XP runs faster on 4+gb, is somewhat more stable, isnt a system hog, and enables me to run more nostalgic games and editing software.

I mean, even my DOS games and programs have DOSBox to fix any compatability issues.. but what about Win95/98 games and apps? Are there fixes like DOSBox or would I have to individually look for 3rd party fixes myself if they don't work with Vista?

What would or how would I benefit [from] if I were to use Ultimate over XP Pro? I really don't know, so that's why I ask.

thanks for any input

 

Stick with XP Pro and skip Vista even though that's what I'm running ATM and there is really no point in getting Ult.! Waste of money IMO unless you have a specific reason for getting it.

I see you're an oldish gamer talking about Dosbox but I can't comment on that yet as I haven't tried it in Vista or W7. If worse comes with W7, then you might want to dual boot with XP to play the older games. There is a freely availble W7 beta from MS ATM, if you have a free partition available or can make one, you may want to try that out.

 

I don't have any spare partitions. I'm running on basically crap hardware.

The reason I was considering Vista is 1) I'm getting an OEM Vista Ultimate for $100 and 2) it may be 64bit


I never wanted to do a dual boot. I don't remember why, but I read in another forum somenoe commented on dual booting and it's not great to do with low system resources (?)

I just remember that I don't want to do that. I am an older gamer, though I still play newer games like COD4, Spore, Mass Effect, Fallout 3 and Farcry 2.

I've never looked into DOSbox working for vista. All I know is down the line, when I upgrade and with system resources becoming cheaper and faster, Vista wil one day replace XP as a whole and in its place (XP) will stand all the Vista OS's as a "standard" just as XP is now over older Win 9x OS's.

My questions was whether or not I should do it -now- rather than a bit later (also considering I'm getting Vista Ultimate, possibly 64bit, OEM/new sealed for $100)

 

They're wrong unless you have low hard disk space, dual booting takes no more resources than a single boot, it all depends on what hardware you have and if it can run Vista properly as we do know that XP lives happily there.

I would recommend running Vista Advisor first to see where your machine stands though $100 for an OEM Ult is a tempting price. It's almost too good to be true. Good luck man.

EDIT: Your hardware should be good enough to handle Vista, not sure about the ATI GPU card but I've run it on a single cored AMD Venice. Ignore what I said above about the advisor.

 

Yeah it was $100 for a solid OEM.

Guy is an engineer who build/t comps on the side though lost sales due to internet sales (cant beat tigerdirect! lol)


So one last question.. since I'm stuck in an infinite reboot, I can't manage anything concerning my system files. My system restore has been permanently corrupted, too.

How do I go about reformatting the drive? I was thinking BartPE or similar, though I'm not sure you can do that with a PE.

Otherwise, all I can think of is installing VistaUlt over XP and then reformatting and reinstalling Vista..


help would be appreciated

 

Just stick the Vista DVD in after changing the BIOS to boot from the optical drive first and reboot, You will then have to wait until it loads the files. When you see your drive then click on the options on the bottom right and format.