[geRV]

Originally Posted by Mr.Buttocks

I think I'll chance it. My confidence has been renewed slightly by reinstalling XP. The difference in playing HL2/Ep1 on XP and playing it on Vista is like night and fucking day! (Probably due to no audio hardware acceleration in Vista?)

More to do with the ram and cpu usage, i find 1 gig of ram in vista to be like 512mb in xp, its the bare essential. Ive got my cousins pc here (vista 64) and it has 2 gig of ram and i find some games get a bit choppy when the drive has to be accessed for saving or whatever. Gears can chop somewhat as can crysis, Tf2 and source games all run fine though.

Dunno really about single core cpu use in vista, theres much more going on in the background so more load on the cpu when running a game. People have complained about the ram usage but really its the same for every new os, windows 95 was easily usable with 32 mb of ram or less, 98 increased it some and then xp pushed the bar further up 256-512mb minimum. Ram has got good pricing these days though, few years back a gig would have cost you a bomb, these days 2 gig of ddr2 can be had for about £40.