Right now Nvidia has publically announced (after quite some delay) that they are experiencing some major problems with their current set of Vista drivers, resulting in poor performance and instability that may cause various games to freeze or crash. This does not affect all users as it's based on the computer's hardware, driver version, and games played, but they hope to work out all the bugs soon. I would expect a reasonable fix within the next month, so I would not avoid Vista just because of that current compatibility issue.
As to the gaming aspect, aside from the above I would not foresee any problems with playing Half Life 2 or similar games since the intended graphics card exceeds the expectations, as does any modern processor.
Hope this helps,
John
Alright, I'll primarily be using this laptop to play the latest DX9 games; for college; watching DVDs and xvids, avis, mpegs, etc; listening to music; surfing the web; and so forth.
The main thing is I'm wondering if Half Life 2 and Oblivion, but especially Half Life 2 will run smoothly on Vista without any problems.
Also my laptop will most likely have an NVIDIA GeForce Go 7950 GTX card in it. Are there going to be driver issues with Vista?
I really would like to upgrade to Microsoft's new OS while I can now, instead of having to buy a retail copy later on. I just want to make sure I'm still going to be able to play Half Life 2 oh and Rise of Nations on Vista. Thanks.

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