phanton-25, this depends on a lot of things, most importantly the specs of your computer. to run vista well, you need a minimum of 1 gigs of memory, preferably 2. dont get complacent if you have a 1 gb ram but 256 of it is shared by your video card/memory. go for vista if you have 1 gb solely dedicated to vista... vista is cooler in the sense that there are lots of graphical enhancements as compared to xp, nothing much that impresses me in terms of ease of use or management of files/folders. i can not speak about security because that is for from my area of knowledge. one thing very annoying baout vista is the fact that it requires you to double confirm small the pettiest of actions like installing a file or copying and pasting stuff...