Which OS is right for me? (in Off-topic)

Below is my current build I will be purchasing in the next week or two (if you really feel the need to suggest changes, go ahead) My only question is which OS to go with. I am currently on Win XP Home 32-bit. Now I obviously need a 64-bit OS to take full advantage of my RAM. Should I stick with windows XP or download windows 7 RC and then purchase it when it comes out?

Mobo - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813138130
CPU - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103680
RAM X2 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820104072
Video - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102794
Audio - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16829102003
HD - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136033
Modem - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16825164003

Anyone? Should I go with XP or 7?

Win7.

Likely anything but Vista.

Seeing as the Windows 7 release candidate is free, why not give it a shot?

Bah 7 is Vista under another name with a service pack same OS's

I'd say XP pro

Thak your absolutely wrong.

Windows 7 is build up around a complete different code then Vista.
Its uses less resources and is faster then Vista.

Ow and people saying Vista sucks don't know what they are talking about. Vista only runs horribly on an older machine. Vista is great for dual and quad cores and runs better then XP on it. And of course DX10 support is always handy.

The only big drawback I found is the UAC of Vista, but that can be easily disabled.

7 is what Vista should have been. It's actually very nice, and I only have beta.

I think I will go with windows 7 for now then and see how it works out.

ow and WindowsXP x64 <-- horrible driver support
Windows 7 x64 <-- also horrible driver support since most of the drivers are in alpha or beta stages.

I would go winxp 32bit until Win7 comes around

Or take Vista64

DOS Shell. It's coming back in style.

Otherwise 7 RC.

I have never had a problem with Vista. Turned off a few useless services i didnt need and runs smooth, on my laptop even.

I've never had any problems with Vista either, the big advantage of my PC is that it's pretty much brand new...

ow and question why a 10.000 rpm hdd?

Rather take two Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST3500418AS, 500GB drop them in raid 0 and they are faster then a single hdd.
And its less $ per GB

Why would you need a 64 bit OS to take full advantage of the RAM?

4GB RAM, 32 bit OS:

bartjan@fenchurch:~$ uname -a ; free -m
Linux fenchurch 2.6.29-1-686-bigmem #1 SMP Fri Apr 17 15:31:25 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 3986 2397 1588 0 231 1310
-/+ buffers/cache: 855 3131
Swap: 1023 0 1023
bartjan@fenchurch:~$

I am running 64-bit Vista, SP2 on my iMac, and it is working pretty well. Didn't even need to use Boot Camp other than to make the initial partition (and wouldn't have needed it for that, even). Using rEFIt to control booting and found all the drivers I needed for networking (including wireless), sound, and high-quality video. My lowest Vista user experience index score is 4.8 (video) with everything else being above 5.2.

Shared an external drive as NTFS, and can read it on both the OSX side and the Vista side, meaning all my music is shared without need of a networked drive solution.

Not saying it was easy, took a whole weekend, with Vista needing something close to 150 updates (no joke) after being installed. But now I have everything on there and Vista seems to be running pretty well.

FYI, I only used Vista because Win7 RC did not run very well at all due to not being able to find good drivers. I would say in 6-9 month, I could probably install Win7 over the top no problem and be able to find drivers for the Mac hardware.

In any case, Vista seems to be doing pretty well.

@bartjan, well because a 32bit windows OS can address more then 3.2GB of RAM.

There is a hack for windows 32bit that does that, which probably the same piece of code for that 32bit linux your running.

And to be fair, linux is not for the mainstream user. More for techies.

uh 32 OS can't address more

I can also verify that 32-bit Win7 (on the Mac) with 4 GB of RAM showed 3.98 GB in use.

Strangely, when I installed 64-bit Vista, it showed 4.09 GB or so.

The number went up, and...ahhhh, found this article on it, though not sure how that applies to bartjan's "bigmem" build:

http://www.vistaclues.com/reader-question-maximum-memory-in-32-bit-windows-vista/

Long story short -- the only way to fully have the 4 GB totally usale in Windows is to have a 64-bit version of Windows. Otherwise it will only see about 3 GB...

In use or displayed in system info? IIRC, Vista32 SP1 and later display the correct installed amount of memory in system information, but remain unable to address it all.

I think that is correct deif...and I think it displays X minus other addressing in use, such as for vid cards, etc. (depending on hardware...)