With the release of Vista at the end of January most, if not all, new PCs will be sold with the new OS pre-installed. But for those of us who already have PCs of a current good spec, will you be upgrading to Vista, sticking with XP or deciding later?

For me personally I am waiting until I build my next PC which will probably be later this year in the autumn once all the bugs are ironed out if Vista (see my topic on Vista and Multicore for more on this), and also once the next wave of CPUs are released from AMD which should be later in the year.
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I'm going to wait a bit until I build a new machine, so I'm not ready to jump on the Vista wagon just yet. I'm more worried about by finding the right motherboard and gfx-card.
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You have to wait until the last moment you'll buy a new PC. It does not avail that you look now for a mobo and a gfx card if you're going to buy a PC in 6 months.
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That's totally true, Demon. Things change quite fast these days, no doubt about that.
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That is very true. Computer technology moves forward at a very fast rate and hardware prices fluctuate a lot even from one week to the next. The best time to start researching the best hardware to purchase is just as you need to buy it. You will know your budget and can then match the hardware to fit what you can afford.

Obviously some of us do keep up to date on current hardware so can easily advise you closer to the time.

Personally I say it is currently best to wait until DirectX 10 based graphics cards are standard and have fully taken over from the current DirectX 9 cards still currently the norm. This should have happened by the summer when more affordable DirectX 10 cards should have taken over the market, instead of at the moment where we only have a single nVidia card that has DirectX 10 support.

The other thing I recommend waiting for is AMD and their next wave of CPUs. At the moment they are dragging their feet releasing chips based on the older AMD64 cores compared to Intel's newer Core CPUs which are currently winning the benchmark battles.

AMD's Athlon 64's are still my preferred CPU, even with the Core Duos showing better results in many benchmark tests, But look at AMD's latest Quad core release. In the case of Intel they have packaged two dual core processors into one single CPU package that requires a single slot and a single heatsink and due to the low power consumption of the Core Duo it still pumps out less heat than the older Pentium D range did. AMD's solution on the other hand is to supply a matched pair of dual core FX processors which require a special dual CPU motherboard, dual banks of ram, and a lot of heat, power consumption and noise thanks to also needing two heatsinks and fans. I'm waiting to see what AMD have waiting behind the scenes as this is a clear case of getting something into the market to compete against Intel whilst they finish off the true successor.
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The only OSs I plan switching to in the future are AmigaOS 3/4/MorphOS/Linux.
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Only looking to upgrade to OS4.0 in the near future. (Hopefully anyway)
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I'm happy to wait it out for a while. I haven't used the PC for games in quite a while, and don't really need DX10.

I'd like to see Vista running with the natty Aero interface and all that, but am not so keen that I'm going to upgrade my hardware.
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As said in another topic, I won't be getting Vista before I build a new system which definitely won't be this year. Only thing that sucks is not being able to get DX10. But developers are going to support DX9 a while yet, that's still the largest userbase for now.
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When i eventually get a new system built for me thats when ill upgrade and if im honest i desperately need a new system as mine is finding it hard to run new windows live messenger, WMP 11 and surf the net at the same time without freeing ram every 20 mins.
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