You don't need any high end card simply to have the Aero themes and sidebar enabled. The main complaint with those is by devout gamers since the "eye candy" for selling the new version that chews on ram a little more then anything else.
Here with the exact same number of startups seeing the exact same programs in both versions I can start to work sooner in Vista then XP. I've been putting that to the test over the last year and a half.
XP will still have drivers loading while I already have something running in Vista. But everyone's own software environment will always be slightly different there to start with.
As far as the old add/remove feature you can actually see WMP and IE removed but no longer in Vista. For XP you would need to have the iesetup.exe or a full download of a browser stored on the drive however to avoid the need to see Windows reinstalled in order to get back online. Vista now sees things sowed in a little differently there while still having the option for removing updates.
Here with the exact same number of startups seeing the exact same programs in both versions I can start to work sooner in Vista then XP. I've been putting that to the test over the last year and a half.
XP will still have drivers loading while I already have something running in Vista. But everyone's own software environment will always be slightly different there to start with.
As far as the old add/remove feature you can actually see WMP and IE removed but no longer in Vista. For XP you would need to have the iesetup.exe or a full download of a browser stored on the drive however to avoid the need to see Windows reinstalled in order to get back online. Vista now sees things sowed in a little differently there while still having the option for removing updates.