[masraum]

You know, I'd heard nothing but bad about Vista when it came out. I'd avoided it like the plague. XP worked great compared to previous versions of Windows. Last year I bought a new PC. It's a Dell Core 2 duo, 4 Gb ram, decent HD, DVD burner. Nothing special, refurbished, I paid $270. It came with 64bit Vista Home Premium. I wasn't sure what to expect and thought that I'd end up installing XP, but Vista works, very, very well. Much better than XP. Yeah, if you pull up the task manager, it shows it's using a lot of RAM. I've read that MS changed their RAM philosophy with Vista. Previously it was to have as much as possible free. If it's "free" then it's sitting there not working for you. So now they've decided to use most of the RAM all of the time. This new PC is blazing fast compared to my old PC. Yes, it's got more processor and more RAM. Still, it's very fast. It certainly feels better than XP to me.

I recently upgraded to Vista Ultimate. Now I've got RD (only in ultimate and business), and the SUA (subsystem for UNIX based Applications) download which allows me to use a bunch of unix commands in a command prompt which is nice. Here's a sample.

C:\Windows\system32>ls | grep system*
systemcpl.dll
systeminfo.exe
systemsf.ebd

C:\Windows\system32>

I like it. It's only available for Win 2003 server, 2008 server, and Vista Enterprise/Ultimate as far as I know.