I have an issue with the comment about 964 and 914.

i had a similar spec machine to the OP's in mid 2007 except I only had 2 gig of ram. I found vista to be very resource hungry and switching to windows 7 made an amazing difference to my gaming experience. a fresh install of vista didn't change anything but the change to win7 that came after was like putting fresh suspension on an old car. this came in the form of higher graphics settings, faster fps with the same hardware, and for some reason, it reduced my ping to the busier Aussie servers by nearly 2/3's.

I don't play video games, so maybe that is why it doesn't bug me.

If the PC is stable running Vista, you shouldn't upgrade. If it's crashing a lot, or otherwise problematic, then I would consider an upgrade but only if you have 4 GB of RAM.

You can pare out most of the garbage that made vista problematic, and if it's not on a corporate network (ie. home use) then it should run fine. I am writing this from a Vista PC right now. So it does work.

Windows 7 is definitely better, but to do it right, you need to clean install. Don't do an upgrade. You'll just drag vista issues into Win7.

PM me if you have more questions.

new laptop has 8 on it ....I want 7 back :(

upgrade from vista to 7 was a good thing

yes, definitely a clean install for 7.

for Flieger, true :) another POV re: my machine is it couldn't run more than a few processes at once smoothly, often locking up. for me that was an open browser, watching a movie, having ms office open and sometimes 3rd party stuff like movie editors. for what was at the time technically a competent box of parts, installing win7 made it make sense again.

my 2 vista installs were doing something unusual and i know i'm not alone. After a year of running like that (I had a 3rd install of vista running on a separate drive in case I didn't like win7. i never used it) was happy it was corrected.