Vista and Hardware

So I couldn't find this exact thread on an all too brief search, instead, I will just ask my question - apologies if it has been asked before.

I have heard little good about vista, and after using it for now almost a year I am starting to wonder if I should reformat back to xp. I am looking at buying a new desktop, hopefully that will be my new gaming machine, and am wondering about RAM and memory usage. I know vista is much more taxing on hardware... so should I go beyond 2gigs of RAM if I go with vista, and is 2 gigs more than enough if I go with xp?

I have been out of the computer game long enough, I just know vista sucks my hardware and don't know the best solutions for it. Thanks guys

if you do not play dx10 games, there's little point in using vista. the only reason i installed vista on my gaming rig was because i got vista business for free.

windows 7 is apparently coming out early next year. unless you have specific need for dx10, just install any windows operating system you have available/can buy cheaply.

so if i am just playing GW, putting xp on my laptop instead of vista should improve my gameplay then?

well, it certainly won't hurt it.

with decent enough hardware, there's little difference between vista and xp. however, if you try to run vista on... say, pentium M era hardware, it will choke and die.

There is no good reason to remove Vista and install XP if you are happy with Vista. In the early days of Vista there were some driver and OS issues which could result in lower gaming performance, but if you have all the latest drivers and your Vista is up-to-date, there should be no problems anymore.
Given the relatively cheap cost of RAM these days, it would be just as simply to go with 4gigs of RAM in your new desktop (even though 32-bit Vista will only see 3+ gigs) - but that may depend upon the RAM prices at time of purchase. Usually, it's cheaper to get 2 x 2gigs of RAM than to get 2 x1gigs plus 2 x 512megs. (and 3 x 1 gigs will sacrifice dual channel RAM)