I'm surprised XP x64 did that ok with 2 gb.

I'm surprised XP x64 did that ok with 2 gb.  (I will admit I didn't run XP
x64 for very long as I had a B***H of a time trying to find drivers for
everything) I would think with THAT much running at one time though you
would want closer to 4 GB of ram.

--
Jeff

Interestingly, the memory shows no indication of being stressed.

Interestingly, the memory shows no indication of being stressed. In Vista
the CPU is frequently at or near 100% ( and rarely under 70%) while in XP
X64 it rarely hits 75% (while frequently under 50%) with the same load.  Of
course I could probably turn off all the things that make Vista, Vista, but
then why buy it.  WDM adds about 10% most of the time.

Just for kicks you might try turning Aero off.

Just for kicks you might try turning Aero off.  You said you have a 128 mb
graphics card?  I believe that is the minimum to run aero and MIGHT be the
problem.  I would bet though that the RTM version would also give you less
headaches in that area as well.

--
Jeff

You may be right, but my video card has my highest ratings 5.6 and 4.

You may be right, but my video card has my highest ratings  5.6 and 4.9
while the cpu struggles at my lowest 4.1  If I turn off aero and the other
Vista goodies, I might as well be running XP.  I also have about $700 in
programs that won't install or run properly on Vista.  I plan to do a major
re-do of the system this summer and hopefully by then they will have the
rumored trial available to try.  I do like it, just can't use for work yet.

very unstable Vista - I'm not impressed...

John:
I can't resist being the devils advocate, but I remember when x64
wasn't suitable for you to use for work. There are major changes in
stability and speed between RC1 and RTM. I still have my old FX51 tower and
2 AMD 4400x2 towers running with 2GB ram on each. I've made no hardware
changes since they were setup for x64 two years or more ago. With Vista x64
RTM I can still shrink a DVD movie to an AVI file in the background and have
no effect on music playing or anything else that I'm working on. Have a
great day.

--
Dennis Pack
XP x64, Vista Enterprise x64
Office2007

It did take about 7 months before 3rd party programs were available to work

It did take about 7 months before 3rd party programs were available to work
with X-64 so I could work on it.  The OS wasn't the problem, the 3rd party
support was.  X-64 was and is very stable (except for the OE problem that
had a workaround)



At this point, Vista stability isn't a problem (though it's version of IE7
frequently crashes and restarts with 'a problem'. It is that the overhead
from Vista is too much for my computer to deal with.  Vista RC1 running with
no changes from what is installed, puts approximately 25-30% more of a load
on my CPU making many functions unstable or slow when added to my work load.
When I bought the parts for my computer 2 years 1 month ago, the 3500+ was
the second level down on the AMD availability.  I think the 3800+ was the
top.