Now it's my turn...

[Calneon]

I have a Creative X-Fi soundcard and it works fine with Vista.

DK, I understand your argument, the BF2 one sounds more like a GFX card error than the OS, BF2 works fine for me. If the others are incompatible, then it's a fair point. However, for 99% of games there are patches that make games work on Vista, maybe you're just unlucky.

In terms of why Vista is better, there are a few things I could tell you, though I'm sure people who know a bit more could tell you even more. For one, security is much better, as you said UAC gets annoying but you can turn it off and be done with it. Firewall, Windows Defender etc are better in Vista. There are small things, for example, if Vista is downloading an upadate in the background, on XP it would have stolen all your bandwidth leading to lag in games, however in Vista it only takes what it can when you aren't using it. Other things like indexing which keeps and index of your files for easy searching, makes searching A LOT faster and it only uses resources when you aren't using them.

DX10 also, though I don't use it on many games because they don't use it properly, many games are now starting to use it (for example Far Cry 2 performs BETTER with DX10 than DX9 on my PC). Obviously Vista looks much nicer than XP (And I have a custom skin to make it look even better). Driver support is much better, where in XP I had to have the disk to install my printer drivers, Vista already has them or can download them, so I was up and running in minutes. Same with my 360 controller, I actually downloaded the drivers just to realise I didn't need them.

That's all I can think of right now xD.