Vista vs XP

[Khalor]

I have spent the last 4 days of my life grappling with Vista in a post-production environment, and FOR THE LOVE OF GOD CHOOSE XP.

Not only does Vista hog resources (even in Classic it uses 60% of ye RAM, down from 70% whilst using Aero), Direct X has issues in 3D programs (in our case 3DS MAX) that corrupt your preview windows and makes even the most simple tasks difficult, installing Adobe CS3 apps is a struggle, and it can't even see XP computers on the network without special patches.

Perhaps that's a little harsh, and of course there's the issue of support for XP being dropped in the not-too-distant future, but if we had an option to revert to XP on those PCs (not possible due to a lack of drivers), we would have. Please note that our experience may not be indicative of Vista's performance elsewhere, and benchmarking was not possible due to different specs on our Vista and XP computers.

I'm curious to see what people far more qualified than myself think of Vista being used in pro post workflows.

[bunker]

Stick with XP ! Vista will make you waste your time and your money !
I would also suggest that you look into Mac OS and/or Linux if you have
a bit of time. These two OS, unlike Windows, will be better with new releases.
And they are already better anyway :)

[Halford]

XP!
our test machine got 55% resourses stolen with the basic vista upgrade...not to mention some issues running our production softs. thx god we tested it .... for once I'm happy to keep an old version

Hal.

[RyanM]

Im no pro but ive been useing vista Home premieum on my laptop with after effects CS3 and have had no problems thus far, I mean there was this thing were when I went to close out AAE it would say it crashed and ask me to save but I was trying to close it out anyway so I dident care if it crashed. lol it hasent happend in a long time though. Weird.

Just as a overall I dont see why people hate vista so much I mean the only thing that can be a little taxing on the nerves is the user account control but other than that ive only been pleased with it.

[klingspor]

Another vote for XP here. Anything graphics related we threw at Vista was slower than with XP on the same machine.

It has zero new features required for my work. It dumbs things down but doesn't make the nasty stuff any easier or more efficient. The constant security prompts are pathetic. And the new interface is quite tasteless in my opinion.

Besides, I found the new theme really gets in your way when trying to color correct or match footage... I'll stick with XP until we get After Effects on Linux or a decent alternative. Either that or my next machine will have an Apple logo on it.

[beenyweenies]

Just as a overall I dont see why people hate vista so much I mean the only thing that can be a little taxing on the nerves is the user account control but other than that ive only been pleased with it.

The main thing is that it has been shown to be a massive resource hog. Being on a laptop you are probably a little resource-constrained as-is and therefore haven't noticed it as much, but on desktops Vista can consume as much as 80% of free RAM and tack your CPU up to 25% all the time.

It has also been shown to have a wide variety of problems such as installing programs, working with certain *common* file types, stability issues, control issues etc.

[GRK7]

Stick with XP.
Vista seems to make a hobby out of crashing After Effects at the worst time.
I had at least 20 crashes over the weekend - no exaggeration - on a brand new PC.

[Shanytc]

No problem with Vista here.
Vista uses all RAM avail' real time, while XP does memory management with it's shared processes.
choose wahtever, both are excellent choices.

[FreakWizz]

OGL performance is at least 10% slower under Vista (likely more)
DX9 performance is hugely slower in Vista than XP, and DX10 under Vista slower again.

On my 4Gb machine Vista's Explorer was using 202Mb and Search Index about the same amount of memory (that's just nuts!) Aero slows down anything graphical, and Explorer is dumber than ever and is far more frustrating to use.

The lesson is if you like peformance, than any OS MS makes will be slower than the previous model. Stick to XP or even W2K.... :) Vista is for show ponies, people who need to adopt the new technology now, not for actual production based workstations, that are really about working and not looking a little prettier.

[EricBrooks]

Another vote for staying with XP. We have looked at upgrading our network to vista from xp (running maya, lightwave, and all CS3 programs) but decided against it due to the number of issues others have had with vista.

[ingramworks]

Another vote for XP and, if you can, the 64bitt version. I use it and it performs very well. You don't get the full use of memory as a 64bit app, but AE will see up to 3gigs and that does help quite a bit.

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