I need some opinions!

I have had some problems after using vista for a while with my old sound blaster live!, which worked perfectly under windows xp, but with vista i needed some third party drivers. At first i thought about buying a new one, and i even asked for some advice at http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/foru [...] reme-audio but in al all, money runs short, and after seeing some windows 7 benchmarks (overall improvements over vista and xp), i decided using xp until windows 7 comes out, but i would like your opinions on the subject!

Do you think i should use xp or vista?

Im using a athlon 64 3500+ @ 2500mhz, 2gb ddr1 and a 9600gt, but im looking for playing a few games, and since my card is dx10, im afraid i might be loosing something on effects.

What do you think?

Xp, or vista, considering im using a 9600gt?

Heya,

It frankly makes no difference. Use Vista if you want to take advantage of DX10 in various games. If you have no care for DX10, or play no games that actually use it, then XP is perfectly fine. The only reason to use Vista over XP, at the 32bit level, is DX10 frankly. When you get into DX10, and soon, DX11 (DX11 will likely hit around when Windows 7 does), and when/if you ever want to use 4gigs and higher amounts of RAM, then it'll be time to get an x64 OS (or whatever OS supports DX11 when it hits); or a combination of the two.

Note, your DX10 capable 9600gt will not have DX11 support when it hits next year, and you're already talking about not using an OS that supports DX10 (Vista) in favor of XP (DX9). I'm guessing you don't really care about DX10 effects at all or don't play games that even support DX10 effects. If that's the case, you're fine, because you probably won't care about DX11 either and you can just continue on with XP and DX9 until it totally stops getting support (and when games are released that only support DX10 as a minimum).

Very best,