I've switched to Anaconda recently: <a href="http://continuum.io/downloads" rel="nofollow">http://continuum.io/downloads</a><p>It has all the same libraries, Spyder, etc., and seems much more versatile, with easy package management and upgrades, and the ability to have different independent environments, e.g. one for Python 2.7 and one for Python 3: <a href="http://continuum.io/blog/anaconda-python-3" rel="nofollow">http://continuum.io/blog/anaconda-python-3</a><p>Plus it's cross-platform and works pretty much identically on Linux and Windows (and presumably Mac).
First, it should be noted that pythonxy is for windows. Second, I find it hard to continue recommending pythonxy because of it's lack of 64 bit support. This limits the memory consumption of the python process to 2gb, which is unacceptable in a lot of modeling scenarios. I'd recommend Anaconda, or Spyder + 64 bit versions of the python packages you need (available here for windows users: <a href="http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/" rel="nofollow">http://www.lfd.uci.edu/~gohlke/pythonlibs/</a>).