For those of you deciding to wait for the next operating system and bypass Vista you may be in luck.  Bill Gates announced and an international technology summit recently that they may be pushing up the release date of Windows 7 to sometime in the next year.  This is almost a full year earlier than their prior date of 2010.  This obviously is conjunction with massive concerns of Vista's stability even though SP1 has been released and widely hailed as a huge improvement.

For those of you that can't wait for the new operating system, many manufacturers are starting to put Vista 64x edition standard and not just ultimate.  The boost in performance in 64x and with SP1 hasn't been benchmarked nearly enough.  With first hard experience with the 64x systems as long as you ensure that the computer has a strong processor as many still don't come with good stock, you can get a machine that can rival some XP machines for performance.