Ok guys, so I made the jump back just a little while ago, and I must say that I am very pleased with how much better XP makes things flow. Granted Vista had its ";neat tricks"; XP just seems like much less of a resource hog. I was working on a score in Vista, and it was all Lite Instruments, battery and front ensemble, and even though I had everything tweaked out pretty good, i still ran into some hiccups. Playing back the same score without any tweaking in XP gave me perfect playback. For all you guys wondering, XP, for me at least, has proven to be the better of the two. I got Vista like the week after it came out, and I was pretty happy with it, but the more i did, the more it bogged down, I know this is usually the situation, but it seemed like Vista seemed to age, the older it got, the less capable it was ( not a punch at any of the older guys on here i swear!!! ) lol. But back to the topic, things just seem to run much better on XP. IMO, Vista is for the graphic hungry side of us, and XP is for the productivity/wanting to get things done side of us. If only Microsoft could meet in the middle of these two and produce an amazing product... hmm... sigh...

Yeah, Vista is terrible, and SP1 barely fixed anything.  You need 2 GB of RAM just to write a paper it seems.  I know a guy with an 8-core Xeon system that only scored a 5.9/10 on the Vista ";experience"; cpu test.  Ridiculous.  The user interface added [i]more[/i] clicks to do the same task in XP too.  64-bit driver support for audio hardware is almost non-existent. 

That's why I only use OS X now :)

If anyone is wondering if they should ";upgrade"; -don't do it.  If you are buying a new system, see if you can get it with XP instead.

Yeah I was on Vista for about 9 months. I'm happily back on XP now. Vista is pretty, but way too bloated, and XP just feels more responsive overall. I only wish I could run Sibelius 5 and VDL in Linux, it's the only thing still keeping me on Windows.

A lot of video/animation software is becoming popular on Linux, so maybe we'll see some good audio programs.  I tried using ";Wine"; to install some audio programs but no luck.  I guess some people got Kontakt 2 and Sibelius 4 to work, but not 5.  Considering studios have dedicated machines that want to run a very minimal OS, Linux would be the way to go.  All it would take is something like an official Pro Tools on Linux and *poof* the industry would change. 

[quote author=J Mattson link=topic=2372.msg12599#msg12599 date=1206594062]
A lot of video/animation software is becoming popular on Linux, so maybe we'll see some good audio programs.  I tried using ";Wine"; to install some audio programs but no luck.  I guess some people got Kontakt 2 and Sibelius 4 to work, but not 5.  Considering studios have dedicated machines that want to run a very minimal OS, Linux would be the way to go.  All it would take is something like an official Pro Tools on Linux and *poof* the industry would change. 
[/quote]

Linux has some decent platforms for Digital Audio work, [url=http://ardour.org/";]Ardour[/url] being one of the more robust ones. However, audio production on Linux is still a long way from commercially available products in terms of functionality and support, especially in the notation world. I've explored nearly every notation tool available for Linux and they are all still in their infancy compared to Sibelius or Finale, let alone the integration of virtual instruments in Sibelius 5. While emulation solutions (like Wine) do work for a very select range of products, they do not work 100%, include this with next to no hardware driver support and no native VST support and the platform for audio production is dead in the water. I'd love to see native solutions of Sibelius, Cubase, Pro Tools and others available but it's highly unlikely to happen anytime soon.

For those interested [url=http://www.ubuntustudio.org/home";]Ubuntu Studio[/url] is a Linux distro optimized and built for Audio/Video production and includes most of the top software available all in one package.

Not gonna lie, I miss the visual aspect of Vista, but XP is just more more responsive like was said. I used Vista, and unless Windows new OS, which is due out sometime in 2010 is better, I will probably stick with XP for a while. As far as Linux goes, I dont have much experience with it, but i do know some people that were running it on the original Xbox, and it seemed pretty nifty. I would like to see it in full functionality on a computer though... seems interesting.