New computer ... XP or Vista?

Ok just got my new XPS computer. It has both Vista Ultimate and Win XP, both 32 bit. I use Microsoft Office 2007 Suite and the Adobe Production Suite CS3 for most of my work. Anyone have working knowledge of Vista versus XP. I've been running XP. Don't want any I've heard or bad publicity, just help from those using Vista and these programs.
Thanks,

Don

Don Igot a new dell laptop loaded and it came with Vista. It's nice but a real pain in the ___ wish I had XP on it. But then again I didn't pay for it so guess I shouldn't complain.

Don: stick with XP. I have played with mostly all 32-bit and 64-bit Windows OSes (including win7) and always returned to XP with which I have no problems.
Zygis

Depends on the system... I run 64-bit Vista with very little problems. I had a TON of problems at first, but I discovered it mostly had to do with the wrong drivers and wrong speed memory for my processor.

I frequently use the wife's computer as well as mine and her system is very similar in stats to mine, but with XP. Vista 64 runs circles around it in speed (well, it helps that I have 16 GB of RAM).

I have also been running Windows 7 on another hard drive and it kicks XP and Vista's butt in stability and speed.

I bought an vista 64 bit machine with 8 gigs of ram quad core processor yada yada....
The only thing I run on this machine is Sony Vegas and After Effects CS4
Vegas works great but AE crashes constantly. Mostly when its rendering.

I was thinking Vista was the devils spawn but from reading on Adobe's forums I think the issue is the video card in the pc so I think I'll upgrade the card to one that is recommended.

Like Dave said, Vista 64 with the added ram is so much faster then xp, as long as I can fix the crashing problem.

I've been hearing good things about Windows 7 too.
Jake

Personally I think it's an unlucky time to buy a PC (not that you generally can choose when your old computer should break down but still). Microsoft wants XP to reach end of support and release these developer resources. At that time, upgrading to Windows 7 would be a must.

Microsoft seems to have given up Vista as a bad job and I don't think that beast will ever fly gracefully. Windows 7 seems to be a "step back and make it right this time" upgrade rather than an increment of Vista. I am however not a Microsoft employee so this is just a guess.

Windows 7 seems really good, but I have no illusions it will be particularly bug free until say a year after its general availability.

If I were to buy a PC I'd get a XP 64bit (preinstalled so all drivers are already dealt with) and then I'd switch to Windows 7 say a year after it's release.

The reason for 64" is that you really need it on a PC working with heavy programs. By default, if you don't tinker with the machine, a 32bit program can only see 2GB which is bad for video editing. There are also memory addressing issues that makes it impossible to use the memory area where the graphics card maps. So if you have a 512MB memory card, you can not use more than 3.5GB of 4GB of memory (in practice, even less because of other devices). That is, computers sold with 4GB instead of 3GB are not really worth the extra cost.

If I'd buy a desktop machine, I'd choose one with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_random_access_memory#Errors_and_error_correction memory without any hesitation whatsoever. Computer memories do fail every now and then, even if memtest reports ok. The more memory you have and the more it shrinks, the higher probability of a bit error. If the machine is heavily multicore, I'd probably bother with registered ECC memory if the price is reasonable. ECC unfortunately rules out the otherwise spectacular i7 processor but I think the entire AMD line of 64bit enabled processors supports ECC even if far from every motherboard does.

Marcus

I bought a Dell with Vista on it, used it for 3 months, and then promptly went back to XP. I think Vista is the worst OS ever released.

I have been working with Vista 64 bit now since January.. at first it was a real pain in the --- well in any case, now it seems to be somewhat stable. I have successfully installed old apps that were 16 bit and they run, I have 32 bit apps, and they run, I have 64 bit apps, and they run too. Amazing. But here is a list of things to note:

Adobe: Photoshop CS4 - comes in both 32 and 64 bit - both work well.
AE CS4 - is a 32 bit app but will use beyond 2 gb ram.. go figure.

Sony: Vegas Pro 9.x (both 32 and 64 bit) - work and have gotten better - but memory management sucks on both... for example, I can output mp4 only on the old 32 bit version 8.x... but 8.x, 9.x whine about not having enough memory. Stupid.. So I run 4 versions of Vegas Pro -

Other Adobe apps... touch and go.. I have some CS3 and the production suite of CS4... premier seems to do quite well.

I think personally that once you figure out the mechanics of installing apps on Vista 64 - you can have quite a bit of success with it. I am running this on an I7 - and yes memory is finicky - I recently got a new message from the Sony apps that the memory has a problem. Although any other memory test says it's fine.. so the question I have is - does Sony just make up messages or are they truly real? Not having much faith in Sony's memory management methods, I think it is a bogus message. But since the Sony people (support) only knows how to give canned responses, it is hard to say. At least with the Adobe people, they actually do take some time to figure stuff out, but it does take time. A perfect example of this was at the beginning of CS4 - their update blew everything up... now it seems to be very stable across all apps.

My take is that all the software vendors always blame everything on drivers etc.. hence, lots of finger pointing.. but every once in a while some third party out there comes up with a solution that fixes all kinds of things.. Look at DEP (Data Execution Prevention) for example on Vista. Fine tuning that cures some pretty big heartaches.. too bad Microsoft doesn't talk about that a whole heck of a lot.

Thanks ya'll. The system first booted up in XP. I played with it for a couple hours then decided to install the Vista Ultimate. It took less than an hour to install since there is very few programs installed for it to link. I then installed the Production Suite CS3 and have played a little with it under Vista. No issues as of yet. Having all these recommendations helps make it easy to watch for problems and I can always re-install XP since I have both disks. Let's see what happens when I get a bunch more intensive 32bit programs installed.

Thanks,

Don

Ok what I've learned so far. Premier Pro CS3 is failing immediately after exporting a clip to .mov, sometimes before the export is complete. When I called Adobe for a new authorization key he said the Adobe suite will work great under Vista ... not so sure now.