Vista or XP for Dev Machine [closed]

Answer 1

An important thing to note is that Vista does not support Visual Studio 2003, check out Visual Studio and Windows Vista

Just keep in mind that you'll be wasting 0.5-1.0gb of your RAM with x86. You should be able to get nearly free x64 media here. Your license is good for both editions.

With Vista SP 1 you no longer waste the 0.5-1GB RAM, it now able to see the full 4GB. Though having said that, this microsoft site doesn't say that it can use all of the 4GB RAM. It says that it can report on all of it. :)

Answer 2

I can definitely tell you to steer clear of any of the lower end vista installs, because you'll lose:

• Ability to do simple backups to a disc not physically connected to your machine;
• Term serv access to your machine from any other;
• Like Fry says, you'll lose RAM. I have 4, vista only "sees" 3.

I'm talking out of the box at least. I want to go x64 but really dreading having to reinstall everything.

Answer 3

I use Vista Business on my home rig, and do a lot of development there and love it.

My work rig is XP, and its fine too.

Answer 4

Both. I imagine you will need to test your applications in both XP and Vista..

Which one you use to actually develop on is personal-preference, and nothing more.. There's a few technical benefits to using either (for XP, there will be a bit less memory overhead of the OS. On Vista, there are lots of new features, some of which may be useful), but Visual Studio will pretty much work the same on both..

As for 64 vs 32 bit.. I would say use 64-bit - if for no reason but easily using > 3GB RAM, and that you can virtualize a 32-bit OS on 64-bit, but not vice-versa

Answer 5

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.