So long story short, there’s a chance I might be getting a new laptop to replace my laptop that will be handed off to a co-worker. While I can get the new laptop with Windows XP Pro, I’m debating whether I should go with Vista (would have to be Ultimate or Business edition because of the Windows Domain/Active Directory access I need) since Microsoft is going to be phasing out sales of XP in the next few months. My brief experiences with Vista on this laptop (in a temporary dual boot) weren’t all that great, and this certainly isn’t a slouch hardware-wise, and that pretty much ran in line with every other Vista vs. XP rundown. The problem is that most of those XP vs. Vista comparisons are from when Vista was first released. So after some searching, I found this one that shows improvements in Vista with apps and games (with a Vista service pack release candidate installed).
So, you power users out there (and I’m talking folks who run more than a few programs at once and actually use memory and CPU-intensive programs): What do you think? Have you really pushed Vista to its limit? Do you have any applications that you need that don’t work in Vista? While I’m not much of a gamer (I don’t have that kind of time), application performance is key for me, especially in things like the Adobe Creative Suite (CS2) where I spend a great deal of time, rendering, editing, and dealing with dozens of RAW images at a time. But I want a decent video card so I don’t waste system memory on video processing. I also have a lot of other little tools that I’d try to use, most of which will need to work (some of them I can live without, but many I can’t because of the jack-of-all-trades nature of my work).
I will be getting a dual core CPU, a 7200 hard drive, and at least 2 GBs of RAM (along with a DirectX10 GPU), but I probably will avoid the x64 version of Vista, simple because of driver issues — I have to deal with a lot of old and obscure hardware and peripherals here, and I have a feeling that the 64-bit version might give me issues. I don’t have a 64-bit CPU to test with, otherwise I would beforehand (that, and I’ve heard that CS2 doesn’t like Vista64 at all, but somebody correct me if I’m wrong).
Any thoughts from anybody? As usual, I’ll be shopping at Sager for my laptop.
Edit: Forgot to mention that I do have a fully legal copy of Vista Business edition (given to me by a friend of mine that has OEM contacts all over the place) that, should I ever feel the need to, I could upgrade on top of a Windows XP Pro install.
Comments
My wife uses vista on both her laptop and her desktop with CS3 (mostly Photoshop) with RAW files from her camera, as well as 500-1500MB files in Photoshop, and doesn’t seem to have much issue (except that Photoshop eventually craps out and needs to be restarted when working with that large of files, but that also happened in XP).
Also, on the vid card. Are you doing video effect rendering, or 3D rendering? You aren’t going to see much difference in just Photoshop and things, since 2D rendering takes so little GPU power, and your VRAM won’t really be used for your basic Photoshop, etc. effects anyhow.
Last I checked CS2 was unsupported on x64, but I haven’t really looked since we upgraded to CS3, and are still on x86.
I would go with Vista personally. I game a lot, and have had no problem getting things working, and decent performance out of it. I do have XP to dual boot into, but it has been at least a month or two since I have been in XP.
I knew you’d have an opinion, Rick 🙂
Like your wife, I work with huge files in Photoshop, too (along with big files in Illustrator). Obviously having a powerful video card isn’t a big deal here, but having a video card that isn’t using system memory is (which is an issue with most laptops that are less than $900, it seems). I also prefer high res displays (I’m running 1920×1200 on my 15.4″), and a more powerful video card is needed to push that and keep it going, especially if you’re running an external display like I occassionally do.
I don’t do a ton of video effect rendering, but have started doing more recently, and I know that some video editing programs can use GPU power to process those effects.
And I just want the GPU power for bragging rights 😉 Seriously, though, I do game in spurts, and when one of those spurts comes, I want things to work.
If I were to set up with Vista, I will probably setup a dual boot (or at least a strong Virtual Machine) for the times where I really need XP (we have some archiac DOS-based programs here, too). Need to budget for a larger hard drive, me thinks…
Vista. Don’t do XP. You can always set up a Virtual PC or something with an XP OS installed (but I don’t). People love to complain without a lot of real proof about cause/effect. I run Vista and love it.
Since you’re gaming, probably the very safest thing to do is to go with 32-bit for now. I run 64-bit Vista Ultimate on my laptop, love it.
Make sure you get at least 2GB RAM. More than 4GB is a waste on 32-bit OS, so don’t go higher unless you choose to go 64-bit.
If you were to use CPU-intensive (or RAM demanding) apps that are 64-bit compatible, you might find that 64-bit Vista is a benefit. Else it is more likely to be a wash. For now.
But do your driver homework for the hardware you use. If 64-bit support is there, it can be a good move.
I have Vista running on my (new) laptop, and I don’t hate it as much as I thought I would. I turned off the nanny (UAC) within a few minutes, and keep finding stupid things (like the telnet client isn’t installed by default), but I’ve been happier with Vista than I’d expected to be.
I am running the 64-bit version and haven’t had any driver issues, but I don’t use anything obscure. I do have 4GB of RAM, but I also tend to do things like run 4 virtual machines at the same time… I rarely have fewer than 8 different programs running.
I’ve surprised myself for not reformatting with XP, but I’m finding Vista surprisingly workable for the things I do.
Don’t do Vista! I installed it on the Alienware laptop I got last year. Business version, 2GB RAM, Core 2 Duo 2G processor, ATI DX9 card, the works.
Ran like a huge turd. I use the Windows Picture Import quite frequently (took about 1,500 family photos last year), and they changed the interface in Vista, it is worthless. I have a Windows 2003 server at home and map my User Directory (My Documents) to U: – Microsoft has split the “My Documents” into multiple folders now, you can’t map just one, won’t work.
The computer locked up, crashed and ran really slow all the time. So in January I upgraded to Windows XP Pro. The computer is night and day different, it is faster, I can import pictures the way I want, and “My Documents” is “My Documents” again.
I’ve had a couple of my other techs testing Vista with similar results. We’ve made the decision not to upgrade our corporate network to Vista either based on what we have found from this testing.
Just say no to Vista!
Vista has been a huge problem in our engineering/production environment.
VPN crashes it often (blue screen of death crashes).
Copying files across the network are orders of magnitude slower. The file finder is WAY worse.
The security model can obfiscate where files are and how to get access.
I’ve stuck with XP, and in fact, it now dual boots to Ubuntu Linux, which I really like. I work in Ubuntu most of the time, but still have to swap over to XP to run my image editing programs…
I recently upgraded to a new Dell Vista Ultimate machine and haven’t found it too bad – I’ve turned off Aero though and set the desktop to look like Windows 2000 (as I did with XP) and it seems reasonable.
I’ve had a couple of occassions where Firefox would appear to “hang” for a minute or two, but it sorted itself out after that. Adobe CS3 seems to work ok (I haven’t done that much with it), so does RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 and Civilization 4. I tend to have Virtual PC running all the time (with my Linux test environment on it), Openoffice, Google Desktop, AVG antivirus, Thunderbird, Editplus and PuTTY running all the time without issues.
I haven’t managed to start a VPN connection through to my dedicated server provider though – but I think I’m just missing the Microsoft WANMiniport (or something) driver which is a “known occasional issue with XP and Vista”.
Hope it helps!
This may be worth checking out: http://www.vistanews.com/?id=16
Did you ever read that review of XP where the guy “upgraded” from Vista? That is all I am going to say.