price for xp/vista
Xp Vs Vista

If you look around on the internet you can find vista and xp pretty close in price. One discount pc site I use regularly has both with in about $20 of each other and less than $130. Thats for xp pro and vista ultimate. I haven't upgraded yet as machine is about 12 years old, but upgrading motherboard,processor, and ram trhis week and adding more ram in a few weeks so will probably upgrade to vista in a few months after some more of the bugs get patched and worked out.

I'll be getting a vista later, but I've used my Grandma's laptop which has Vista, and I have used XP, and I think that XP was a bit faster, wheras vista took a long time to load but ran fine. I like the way Vista is now, but if it doesn't support the stuff I want to install, my opinion will change.

basically there are the same problems as when xp was released... compatibility issues, lower fps in games, slower running. but with time i guess vista will be the best...

i would like to say though that the appearance of vista is uglier than xp in many ways... i like the blue green instead of black

I think it's going to happen the same thing that happened when XP was released for the first time. Everyone was talking about the cool looks and stuff, but also compatibility, so most people chose windows 98 over XP at that time (some still do ) and right now its kinda the same. Though, most of current hardware will be compatible with windows vista, the problems is the minimum requirements. While XP works well with 256MB of RAM, you would need at least 1GB to run Vista at a decent speed, and it shouldn't be like that.

For now, I'll stick with windows XP until I get my DX10 video card and until vista gets more updates, because, as of today, an upgrade to vista is just not worth the price, for me at least. Everything I need works flawlesly with XP, but I'll consider switching when I get my Geforce 8 or 9 video card

Thing is that most people really had to upgrade when all DOS operating systems were dropped when it came to software support. In response, the community swapped to 2000 or XP. However, there weren't any major issue when it came to software compatibility unless it required real DOS. However, that is fixed now by either the software manufacturer or using DOSBOX.

xboxrulz

I personally looked at Vista and decided for myself that the new features weren't compelling enough for me.
Eye candy isn't a feature in my opinion.
Sticking to XP for the time being and will probably use a virttualized instance of XP inside Ubuntu as my main rig in the future at some point.