Well no wonder you love Vista so much: you bought a mega computer that can handle it! Granted, I find it curious that your experience with 4MEGA Bytes is superior to my experience with 2GIGA Bytes, but I guess the SLI somehow makes up for this ... ? lol. Ok, seriously: My first experiences with Vista were not positive at all - and I do still hate and loathe some things about the OS. But I'm starting to think that my original problems with the OS were due to crappy HP drivers, not so much Vista. For example, I frequently got the BSOD on my recent HP laptops running Vista. (yes, plural. don't ask. just know that i've got experience.) When I first got my HP laptop, the bootup and shut-down were both INCREDIBLY slow! This was a shocker, since my old laptop running XP was blazingly fast on startup and shutdown. Just to test things out, I installed XP on the laptop, and presto magico: The blazingly fast startups and shutdowns returned. So I COMPLETELY disagree that Vista startup and shutdown is faster than XP ... My experience has been completely opposite when testing both OSs on the same system. And my laptop is not slow: 2GB memory and AMD Turion X2 TL-60 2.0 GHz (was the fastest available a month or two ago), NVidia 6150. The gpu isn't the greatest, but it is by no means bad - certainly, it ought to be good enough to smoothly run simple tasks. But Vista is too bulky to allow that! And it doesn't give you the option to revert to the XP style - only the mind-numbing 98 style. Bah!
But I recently built (and am continually building upon) a gaming powerhouse, and I have to say: Vista is a whole different experience when running on a computer that can actually handle it. I can actually *enjoy* looking around rather than dealing with an underlying frustration with lag. And it's nice. There are, however, several things that still bother me to no end that are inherent to the system: (1) I cannot for the life of me understand why the new start menu with a scroll bar is an improvemnt. I like to see EVERYTHING, not peer through a keyhole. (2) The intrusion of the security features is infuriating. It actually asked for my permission to copy text to the clipboard!!! I kid you not. (3) Networking harddrives is unreasonably difficult. (4) If you read forums much, especially forums for mice, you'll find that the jumpy-mouse problem is a *very* common problem. I was lucky enough to resolve the issue by unplugging then re-plugging in my mouse receiver. So ... Those are some things that I really loathe about this OS, and some things that are just irritating.
However, here is the *positive* thing that I have to say about Vista: I LOVE the Media Center! It is the most amazing media-managing program i've ever seen/heard of. It's incredible for watching television and browsing pictures, videos, and everything else. It's fantastic. And when I combined it with the incredible HP remote and tv tuner (that I had to buy a pci-to-express-card adapter for), the experience is just ... beautiful. And now that I've fulfilled my duties to this topic, I should also mention a third con: It is INFURIATINGLY difficult to adjust the resolution of the full-screen MediaCenter when it's on an external display! I often have to exit the program and start it back up ... Sometimes, the issue doesn't get resolved at all, and the picture just gets cut off around the edges and I learn to live with it. All because it's basically impossible to figure out how to adjust the resolution from inside the program ... And no, adjusting the resolution of the display via the display settings doesn't do squat because MediaCenter re-sets the resolution when you put it on full-screen. It makes my blood boil!
So ... Vista is bad on an average system. It's fair of a mega-system, but even then there are things that will turn your stomach.
My question for the original poster: What kind of power supply did your Alienware come with?
If anybody can help me with the MediaCenter resolution problem, I'd seriously appreciate it.