Vista seems inevitable...but which one?!

[BOXXlabs]

You will need Vista Business or Ultimate if you want full support in your pro apps.

[rgwarren]

Personally I would go with Vista Business as Ultimate has that 'pesky' Media Center which cannot be uninstalled. I can't explain it but Ultimate seemed slower than Vista Business.

Of course after a good success with Vista for over a year I recently found a nasty After Effects CS3 memory leak when running a frame blend in Vista and had to move back to Windows XP until CS4 most likely. Now my OpenGL is nice and fast again and After Effects behaves.

[ThE_JacO]

You will need Vista Business or Ultimate if you want full support in your pro apps.

What would not run on other versions?
Maya, XSI, Houdini, All Adobe products, (very old) shake and Fusion, and several other things, run just fine on home afaik.
Maybe some cam/cae apps might not run and I don't know about it, but the difference between business/ultimate and home doesn't include any services that I can think of needed to run 3D or 2D apps.

[imashination]

You will need Vista Business or Ultimate if you want full support in your pro apps.

Why do they need specific versions? As far as Im aware its the same old workgroup/domain differences plus some visual crap nobody cares about.

[BOXXlabs]

I guess I should have said "if you want to be running a tested, certified, qualified & supported version of Vista - then you will need to run Business or Ultimate."

;)

[Magnus3D]

Adam: You whom seem to be working at Boxx, what are you shipping your workstations with ? Vista Business or Vista Ultimate or XP64 ? or which of those are the most popular OS buyers choose.

I can guess it's XP64, but which one of the two Vista's ? :)

/ Magnus

[ThE_JacO]

be careful going xp64, it was a stillborn to start with, and in the next few years it's only gonna get worse in terms of driver and app support.

[BOXXlabs]

be careful going xp64, it was a stillborn to start with, and in the next few years it's only gonna get worse in terms of driver and app support.

huh?

That's not my experience. All of our system are 100% compatible with XP64 and have zero issues.

I cannot think of a single external (or internal) device intended for professional use (tablets, printers, scanners, etc) that don't have very solid 64bit driver support at this point.

[lots]

People like giving into the rumors on the net :)

I've been using XP64 since release, and have not run into a single problem.

[DuttyFoot]

just built a new system myself and not sure what to get..xp64 or vista

[Signal2Noise]

Aside from some early hiccups with Vista 64-bit it has been a rock-solid o/s since. That's on a self-built quadcore system which serves as a gaming and CG rig.

I also just got a new laptop (Dell XPS M1530) running 32-bit Vista. It too has been great. I plan to ditch the 32-bit and go 64-bit on it as well.

Overall I'm happy with Vista.

[PixelTricks]

I've really been trying to like vista.
So since sp1 was out I did an install a few days ago.
I'm ready to switch back to XP x64 now.

The UAC is annoying , but I could tolerate that.
What I can't tolerate is odd behavior in my applications.
Cinema4d crashes a lot more in vista than it ever did in XP.
Mudbox seemed to be working fine until I started using more complex models and then it would just hang at 50% cpu usage .
Same models in XP, mudbox did without issues.
3DSMax 2009 seems to work okay, but I got several plugins that install but don't work correctly. One stickies itself to the desktop and cannot be moved, another causes Max to lock up.
Both worked fine under XP.

So its back to XP x64 for me.
I don't have time to research why each application is having problems or to spend time tweaking everything to make it work like XP.
And if I'm going to have to turn off all these features in vista to make it run like XP, then why even bother with vista.

[salmonmoose]

Personally I'd only buy Vista Ultimate.

I made the mistake of buying a bunch of Vista business machines here, and there are some really strange omissions, like, they can't play DVDs out of the box.

It's not worth the heart-ache, you KNOW which ever version you pick, you'll need something in the other edition :)

[ThE_JacO]

huh?

That's not my experience. All of our system are 100% compatible with XP64 and have zero issues.

I cannot think of a single external (or internal) device intended for professional use (tablets, printers, scanners, etc) that don't have very solid 64bit driver support at this point.

It will change soon don't worry. You can't even buy XP64 (from MS, copies will stagnate around for a while) anymore, a problem we had on a gig I was on just weeks ago when they had to upgrade the farm.
And lack of drivers might not affect the relatively limited top tier components boxx uses, but, just to make an example, we had 12 dell and a couple spare clones that simply couldn't be updated, and they were only two years old. Other companies are also not supporting xp64, especially those that jumped on the 64bit bandwagon last and are going straight for vista.

People can still buy it and use it sure, but they'd better know that they can expect to have to upgrade it and format their drives in a year or two if they do.

Ironically enough, right now the 64bit upgrade paths I've seen the least amount of issues with were all linux, but that's OT.

[UrbanFuturistic]

I think I'd go for something above Vista Home just because I hate being mollycoddled by an O/S. Like XP Home, Vista Home likes to handle you with kid gloves, which is why there's no Administrator login.

Something I don't get, Home includes Media Center but Business doesn't? Quoi?

Realistically, it's mainly the same old No. of CPU sockets, domains, Power-User differences.

Taming UAC (http://blogs.zdnet.com/Bott/?p=436)

OpenGL performance should, theoretically at least, be improved by switching off the ol' Aero interface enhancements. It's not dissimilar to choosing the Windows Classic style in XP.

Anway, after that slightly disjointed lot, good luck :)

[doctorx256]

I don't undestard the hate for Vista or the bad fame for Win XP 64Bit.
I use daily for the last couple of years, 2 Win XP 32Bit machines, 1 Win Xp 64Bit, 1 Vista laptop, they all work VERY VERY fast, no crashes or BSODs since install.

I don't think all the problems come from the operating system itself but from the uneducated users who install them and don't know how to configure them corretly.

I suggest you should use Windows Vista (32bit or 64bit) or Win XP 64Bit on a new machine BUT ask a very good techician to install and configure them.

PS.
drivers / application compotability wasn't a problem for any of those machines.

PS2.
i think everybody ( who has 64bit cpus ) should use 64Bit systems even if they don't have more than 4GB RAM because of the ability of larger pagefile etc etc

[tutelary]

Here are the differences:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1558,2068721,00.asp

For the home user, Ultimate is a waste, and has yet to be supported by MS with add-ons that justify its high pricing. Go Home Premium 64 (unless you need more than 16GB of ram)

[ThE_JacO]

I don't undestard the hate for Vista or the bad fame for Win XP 64Bit.
I use daily for the last couple of years, 2 Win XP 32Bit machines, 1 Win Xp 64Bit, 1 Vista laptop, they all work VERY VERY fast, no crashes or BSODs since install.
Discussing the hate for vista might have its place in another thread, but please don't bring it in here :)
This thread's topic remains helping to choose a vista platform, and while discussing xp64 (since it's a windows alternative to it) is somewhat pertinent, if we start talking of why people might like or dislike vista the thread is sure to go down in a big ball of fire.

I don't think all the problems come from the operating system itself but from the uneducated users who install them and don't know how to configure them corretly.
That would also be a statement that would take a while to discuss, not to mention an array of fire extinguishers :)

i think everybody ( who has 64bit cpus ) should use 64Bit systems even if they don't have more than 4GB RAM because of the ability of larger pagefile etc etc
if you have 3GB or less using a 64bit system is more trouble then it's worth. A 64bit CPU also doesn't mean much, and 64bit in general brings more growing pains problems with it then advantages unless you have the memory to feed it to make a difference.

As for xp64, when you discuss that platform you have to remember that vista was intended to be different and to come out a long time ago. The state xp64 is in is an unnatural evolution for what the product was meant to be that was forced on it by unforeseen dev and release cycles by MS.
It doesn't make it a bad OS, and I'd prefer it to vista, but in terms of future-proofing it's a very, very risky choice, but this might not be as consequential to the single user at home that can easily back up and upgrade after a format a year from now or less. It might prove disastrous for a large company, where deployment is an important part of planning and budgeting.

[imashination]

As for xp64, when you discuss that platform you have to remember that vista was intended to be different and to come out a long time ago. The state xp64 is in is an unnatural evolution for what the product was meant to be that was forced on it by unforeseen dev and release cycles by MS.
It doesn't make it a bad OS, and I'd prefer it to vista, but in terms of future-proofing it's a very, very risky choice, but this might not be as consequential to the single user at home that can easily back up and upgrade after a format a year from now or less. It might prove disastrous for a large company, where deployment is an important part of planning and budgeting.

Couldnt you technically say exactly the same about winxp 32? ;-)

[ThE_JacO]

Couldnt you technically say exactly the same about winxp 32? ;-)

you could in the sense that it was downscaled compared to the initial plans, but it was never an unplanned interim release to support a big platform change.

The difference is that XP64 for workstations is finding itself long in the tooth to support a platform change that initially should have been addressed only by the server release, while the consumer market was supposed to only see vista64.

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