which one would you pick?

[DannyCox]

I just ordered a new Dell desktop with all that fancy new Intel stuff and 24GB of triple-something memory! I have the upgrade to Windows 7 included.

We have Vista on four machines at home (one for each kid, and one "test" box). I hate Vista! It's just a poor man's Mac Leopard. A couple of months ago, I ran some comparison testing, just for the hell of it. I have XP on this old P4 box I'm using right now and Vista on a Intel Dual Core fairly new PC. Both machines are running 8GB of Ram. I have Adobe Premiere on both and loaded up the same video sequence in each, and then ran a side by side rendering. The XP kicked Vista's ass! The Vista PC is supposedly close to 3X faster than my XP box, but the bloated system uses up so much resource, that it's actually slower in real time rendering.

I've seen Windows 7 doing similar stuff, and it's a lot faster.

For coding, I still use Linux (I've been a UNIX user for close to 25 years as part of my previous life as an Engineer), and for video I use a Mac, but for everything else, I still use a PC. All the various platforms are networked to a large file sever I have that is still running Windows 2000 (now with 12TB of mirrored drives! 2 more TB being added this weekend).

For a laptop, I am still using my old IBM ThinkPad running Windows 2000 that I bought in 2001. I'll probably be picking up a NetBook at some point in the near future.