Hello,

I have a quadcore ACER pc with 2GB ram with a Geforce 8600GT video card, in the first months when I runned World of Warcraft it was amazingly performant, even with high video settings, but lately I have troubles with my FPS, however my memory usage still looks the same (about 75%), I have 2 screens so I opened the monitor tool when running WoW and noticed a high increase in In/Out Disc Write/Read and a CPU increase at the moments the FPS really drops, when I look at the proccess doing that, it's vista/system realted stuff.
Before pointing to virus/addware I have Norton Internet Security 2008 and use Firefox with no script and addblock.

Is it possible that Vista one way or the other after a while uses more resources, with the same applications running ?

I suggest getting vista, i have UAC turned off and nothing bad has came from that.

Nothing Bad!
Adv.
More security, more features, many company now days have their drivers for vista....etc

Dis-adv.
Resource hunger (Memory & CPU speed)
Annoying UAC (I dont like to turn it off anyway)

So you get to choose. If it was a vote, +1 for Vista

VISTA MEMORY HOG MYTH
Vista is a vast improvement on XP. It treats the RAM as a flexible cache to feed applications 100 times faster than from disk. Applications take priority and squeeze that cache right down.

VISTA VERSIONS - SHITE
Damn Microsoft! And Toshiba for that matter. But Microsoft first. Vista Premium Home doesn't allow users to get to the policy editor. This'll get hacked but for now, I've found no solution. Now Toshiba - the Qosmio comes with Vista Home Premium and they offer no option for Vista Ultimate.

Let me warn you now that if you want policy editing, install Ultimate immediately after creating your recovery DVD. You will have bought the retail upgrade version of Ultimate only to find that it forces you to do a clean install - shite if you've already installed all your apps. This is Qosmio advice, but likely to be true for any high end laptop with fancy devices built into it, esp. GeForce 9600M GT.

APPS COMPATIBILITY - OK
I was pleasantly surprised to find a legacy Windows application (good on W2000) that needed a compatibility setting in XP Pro (but wouldn't run in XP Home), that application ran straight away in Vista.

UAC
I can live with it but I know what you mean.

AERO
I've noticed no CPU drain due to Aero. I agree with the reply that regarded Aero as a gimmick - but the damned Toshiba people won't allow their excellent Movie Player (with HD Upscaling) to work unless Aero is running. But, as I said, Aero isn't draining the CPU at all.

All in all I've no regrets using Vista - as if I had a cjhoice with the Qosmio. BuT i DO LIKE THE 18½" screen, the fingerprint and camera recognition stuff and the Wireless sensitivity is outstanding (4 bars on the Qosmio, 2 bars on the Dell XPS) in a poor location at home.

"Vista Premium Home doesn't allow users to get to the policy editor."

neither does xp home. Not much point for it, seeing as they cant join a domain.

"I've noticed no CPU drain due to Aero".

Thats the entire point of aero. DWM is designed to use DirectX for drawing widows under aero, instead of using GDI like before (basic theme still uses GDI). DirectX rendering is offloaded to the graphics card instead of the CPU (which was previously used for rendering in XP)

The procedure to downgrade from widows vista to xp in a lap top is the worst experience I ever had.

thats because XP is ancient, no surprise it didnt work well.

Honestly, in my experience, there is nothing majorly wrong with Vista at all, unless you install it on a previously XP computer. Usually, and I stress usually, there will be no real problems with Vista if it is pre-installed on your machine, as I am using an HP G60 laptop with Vista Home Premium installed, and have had no problems at all. The only problems were with some Acer products such as the Aspire One, and they are now sticking with XP, so that doesn't affect you.

XP was fine. Vista is as fine as XP was at the same release stage.

Vista has learned some lessons from XP.

Windows 7 will learn some lessons from Vista.

The only really shitty Windows was ME.

well ME was only designed as a stopgap because neptune wasnt ready. Neptune later became XP, with which MS merged the home (previously DOS based) and business (NT based) lines.