Vista has better security features than XP, which makes it very suitable for the average user with little PC and online security knowledge. It does also have some genuinely nice features, the "glass"/3D UI being one of them.
However, it is a new OS. New Microsoft Operating Systems need a year to mature, in general - and a service pack. For example, driver support for many essential devices is still in beta or just not present, which means poor stability.
Also (and it's a great shame), Vista for some reason wastes a large proportion of system resources on some seriously complex DRM and the flashy new UI. To be fair, the DRM only kicks in when you're playing "premium content" - and that can be anything from a HD-DVD or Blu-ray movie, right down to a music track or youtube movie being streamed from a website.
To anyone underestimating the DRM capabilities of Vista, you are mistaken. Anything deemed to be "premium content" is protected
by the OS, not an application or a particular hardware device. Someone mentioned it was just HDMI in an earlier post - HDMI is maybe 10% of the DRM on a Vista machine, if that - HDMI's pretty much just a way for a video processor to securely ask a display "are you a HDMI-compliant display?". In the case of a movie, it's even down to the level of encrypting data as it leaves the disc drive and decrypting it when it gets to the video processor. And after that, the video card must check that the display meets a particular DRM standard - if it doesn't, the picture is downsized and made fuzzy before being transmitted to the display.
Illustrated here - sound is affected in a similar way.
At the time of writing,
it is impossible to legally play any "premium content" at full quality on a Vista machine with commercially available hardware!
In my opinion if you got Vista with a new PC then great, use it. But unless you really really need a particular aspect of it, do not pay for an upgrade 'cos you're getting a fancy front end and a few security features which can be substituted with common sense and security knowledge. It has no real benefit to a knowledgeable PC user, and the license agreement is more restrictive than ever (pray that you never need to reformat or change a CPU/motherboard) - the majority of its features were designed to make it marketable to Joe Average walking into PC World and buying a brand-name computer. A clue for anyone wondering: the people who know about computers aren't buying Vista.
Anyone who wants to read more about what Microsoft didn't advertise in their huge "the wow" marketing campaign, I suggest you
read this. It's a lengthy and rather technical read but it will truly show you that there is no way around the Vista DRM. The technology itself is actually an impressively secure system, but it really should have been left to a dedicated media playback device rather than a PC OS.
To answer the OP's question - it works, but probably slower and there's no guarantee that all your hardware will work reliably under Vista unless your PC was sold as a unit with Vista pre-installed. Worst case scenario, Vista can shut down your video or audio hardware even if you're not doing anything wrong.
One last thing for the people doubting the truth of all this - the (extremely knowledgeable and trustworthy) computer and security experts who have brought this to light did so by reading Microsoft's own documentation which is freely available on their website. Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean it isn't there.
PS: Hi I'm Rigsta I just got the game, hope to see some of you in-game and have some fun
(Edited for accuracy)
