Vista or XP for Dev Machine [closed]

Question

Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.

---

Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.

Closed 5 years ago.

I am about to get a new PC from work, and it will include the option to have either Vista Business as the OS, or a downgrade to XP Pro. Aside from a tiny bit of testing, I have never used Vista, but overall I have heard many more bad reports than good regarding Vista. I don't think that hardware will be an issue (Intel Core Duo T9300, 4GB RAM, 256MB NVIDIA) in terms of performance. I am just uneasy about using Vista for my main dev system given its history, when I have the opportunity to keep on using XP.

So is there anyone here who has experience with both Vista and XP as the OS on your dev machine? If you could choose one over the other, which would you go with? I will need to use Visual Studio 2003/2005/2008, SQL Server 2005, Virtual Machines, Office, as well as lots of multi-tasking and multi-tab web browsing.

(Note: I am not interested in Microsoft-bashing. If you haven't used Vista but have just heard bad things about it then you have the same level of experience as me and you probably shouldn't be answering the question).

Edit: As I am getting this computer from work I would prefer to use one of the operating systems offered: 32 bit XP PRO or 32 bit Vista.

Answer 1

I've been running Vista(x86 on laptop and x64 on desktop) for over a year, and I would never go back to XP. I haven't had any compatibility, reliability, or performance issues.

As David said, its good to keep an XP VM around for IE6 and IIS6 testing, but I rarely have to use the one I have.

EDIT: Get Vista x64 if you have more than 2gb of ram!! You're just wasting it if you don't.

Answer 2

vista x64 w/ 8 gigs of ram and a plethora of virtual machines and your life will become so nice. whatever you do, don't go 32-bit, there are no advantages to 32-bit over 64-bit.

Answer 3

Vista x64, just off the top of my head:

Better context switching with WDM offloading visual rendering to the graphics card.

Built in search is not just for documents, type event for the event log services for services manager etc. useful for finding xyz utility you use rarely.

More refined control of service start-up ie Delay Start, delays a service for a few minutes as not to bog down boot times. great for sql server and others.

UAC allows you to give admin permissions for the tools you need, while allowing you to test your code with lower permissions.

Shift+Right click on a file select "Copy as Path" very very awesome.

ReadyBoost, stick a 4 gig usb drive in and forget about it. Will be used for cache for superfetch and random access io paging, low memory systems this is pretty noticeable ie laptops.

IPv6 - you'll want it in a year or three

All around more secure.

My personal experience: My work machine is a quad core 2.6 ghz running xp x64 and feels slugish and slow to my Vista home machine, a dual core 2.0 ghz. Visual studio is up in under a second, project loads in a few seconds, compared to my work box where it can take up to 30 secs.

"I am just uneasy about using Vista for my main dev system given its history"

It's history is it's been better than xp since it was released. People like to talk smack.

Answer 4

There is another option: Windows 2008:

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/07/15/2325215

I thought it was interesting.

Answer 5

A note about Vista-64 and Visual Studio 6.0: While the IDE will run under Vista-64 with no problems, the compiler is incompatible. If you're going to be using Visual Studio 6.0, you'll want to have an XP VM and use it there. (I speak from experience, because we have some projects where I work that are still using Visual Studio 6.0. We've moved the new versions of those projects to VS 2005 and will be moving them to VS 2008 shortly.)