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Sadly, since DX10 is Vista-only, it looks like the party will be ending soon.  Ah well, it was a good run.

A quick word about Vista...

While not really recommending it for general purpose use at this point, most seem to misunderstand its memory requirements and usage. While it really should have a GB+ of RAM to run on, it is not really such a RAM hog- the Superfetch feature is designed to "eat all your RAM," precaching as much data as possible according to your usage habits, but releasing it as soon as needed for anything else:

The experience completely changes with 1GB; the improvement is tremendous. Searches appear quicker, applications launch and close faster, and using the OS is just so much better. Once again, we're not telling you anything you haven't heard before, except that 1GB should really be the minimum for any Vista machine and not just those that are Premium certified. Even our budget Buyer's Guides have recommended at least 1GB of RAM for over a year, and Vista pretty much makes that a requirement.

It's the above-1GB range that really has most of us concerned. For the longest time, 1GB was sufficient for most enthusiasts under XP. As applications and usage models got more demanding, and as memory prices dropped, the move to 2GB made sense. Above and beyond 2GB never really made a lot of sense because Windows XP didn't seem to do much with the added memory. Even if you had unused memory, Windows XP didn't really make the most of it resulting in even recently used programs being paged in from disk instead of loaded out of the main memory cache. Vista changes all of this.

And following. My bold. Volume Shadow Copy is also a promising backup feature.

Windows Vista Performance Guide

I'm running Vista with 2GB of RAM and 2GB of ReadyBoost memory.  So far, running out of RAM hasn't been a problem.  It does take a while to boot up, but wake from sleep is snappier than XP.  So far it's been stable.  Even with XP, I wouldn't recommend less than 1GB of RAM.  With low RAM prices, there's no reason to run less.

I also swapped out the X800 (cooling fan was dying and the system was overheating) for a 8600GTS.  The Nvidia drivers are much better than AMD.

You might be able to FutureDreamz, but do you really want to take that much time going for coffee?

There's a small patch out on the web that will enable Vista to run with 256 MB of ram.

Well, I just built from spare parts a PII 400 with NT4 sp6 on it, with 256MB of ram, and is it ever quick.

- By quick, I mean the gui is so freaking responsive that there's no delay or lag when exploring the computer drives or even the network. After a while, one forgets what an "operating System" does vs those new fangled bloated monstrosities that pass for high performance systems.

- CD's take a fraction of the time to mount in explorer than they do in 2000, XP or Vista.

- The network hooks up to the DHCP server almost instantaneously after booting up. I don't see that happening on my "faster" machines.

- Microsoft's update site still automatically updates NT4 sp6 with critical security patches and IE6.0.2800.


The downside, apart from software compatibility?

- Installing an ISA network card, scsi card and soundcard in such a way that each will actually work, and not bring the system to its knees. This involved setting IRQs in the BIOS and chasing down legacy drivers online. Not a hardship if you know how to do it, a simple matter of a few keystrokes, but not something for the casual user.

- Looking all over the place to set up the hardware in the control panel; SCSI's in one place, the network in another, the soundcard elswhere, and no "setup.exe" for any of the drivers.

- Chasing down the "service failing to start" errors. The Event Log is your best friend.

But once it's set up, and you don't try to run stuff on it that wasn't meant for it, it's solid and quick.

That'll be quite a leap.