Vista vs. XP?

[gtkrug]

I am dual boxing on a single computer using AHK. Everything generally worked fine from a multi-boxing standpoint with Vista. I had a problem with Vista and WoW where the system would crash erratically with the error 132 (this happened when running two WoW instances or running a single WoW instance). I tried everything on this page (http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=10021053&sid=1), but none of it would resolve.

Finally, I decided to downgrade to XP, since I have never had this problem in over 3 years of playing WoW on XP. The crashing seems to have stopped (it was erratic enough that I won't know for sure for awhile, but after 2 hours without it happening, I am hopeful that it was Vista/WoW related). But I have a different almost as frustrating problem with XP. The slave character (on follow) lags behind my main character so much that they eventually stop following... It's not a problem when I'm in a specific location doing a quest, but as soon as I need to travel any distance, I am constantly having to walk for a mini-maps worth and stop to wait for the slave toon to catch up... I am getting 60 FPS, doing full screen/minimized. Is the problem that XP starves minimized processes while Vista gives them plenty of CPU? Do I need to put the slave toon in a windowed mode?

Thanks!

[spronnancy]

Well i only used XP and i never had a problem i only use 2 accounts but i've never had a problem with XP

[gtkrug]

It was probably stupid of me to ponder a solution without trying it, but sure enough putting the slave into windowed mode and tuning its graphics down a bit made everything run smoothly. Still it seems like Vista might have a better multi-processing engine inside, but XP does not seem to be crashing the game, so I'll take XP.

[Ghrizzle]

i use xp and find that i do have a bit of a lag problem but that could be more of a ram and internet connection issue. But never had xp crash on me. I was thinking of swapping to vista and grabbing 2 more gigs of ram and a second graphics card but if your getting errors with vista then i might just forget about it and stick with vista. Does any one else have problems with vista or is this incident and isolated one?

[Ualaa]

I've been running two accounts on two PC's (one my older XP system and one my newer Vista system) for quite a while.
Prior to this, both of my systems were XP based. Up until now, the last few years has been two WoW accounts.

Prior to this, I was at five Everquent accounts on five boxes at one point; good old Windows 98 second edition.

I've recently invested in three additional accounts for a total of five. Warcraft runs smoothly except for Stormwind outside of the AH, which is choppy even with only one account going. BG's/Raids, IF and Shatt are smooth, so I don't understand this.

I'm running Vista 64-Bit with 8 GB of Ram, an overclocked Q6600 and 8800 GTX; my system handles five accounts without issue.
64-Bit Vista can use up to 8 GB, which is a lot more then XP, although in retrospect I don't need as much ram as I went with.