Vista or 7 for cad.

[JonJ678]

Hey guys. I'll admit upfront that I'm not fond of windows, consequently don't know very much about it. I'm going to have to move away from XP because I'm now on 6gb of ram, which I'd like to be able to use.

Last time I ran vista was before the service packs and it was a mess. I'm told it's better now. I believe Windows 7 is available in RC form at present. I don't know how to choose.

All I want from it is stability. No crashes. It'll have mathematica, solid edge and ansys installed but absolutely nothing else. I'll uninstall media player and anything else I can work out how to. It wont be accessing the internet.

Currently installing XP to test the hardware. I've got 20gb available +/-5, if it would fit in 10gb I'd go for that. If it must be more than 25 then I'm going to stick with XP until I can get a second ssd.

Which should I go for? It's probably an easy choice, but I really don't know which the answer is. I'd appreciate being told

 

[Caged]

To be honest there's very little between Vista and 7. For the sake of not having something out of date in 3 months time I'd buy 7. Any CAD software publisher that has updated their software to work in Vista will also have it working on 7. Unfortunately most of them are still stuck in XP land.

For the sake of software compatibility I'd probably get a pre-order in for the Pro version, since this comes with an XP virtual machine.

 

[Lum]

Caged is right. In reality 7 is really just a small update to Vista. Vista was not a bad OS but it was a rather radical change and thus suffered a lot of comparability issues. Win7 is just a small update and 99% of software that worked on Vista will work on 7. It's kind of like the shift from Windows 3.1 -> 95 compared to the shift from 95 to 98. The XP mode stuff that Caged mentions also pretty much seals the deal. Your CAD software doesn't run under anything but XP? fine. run it under an XP VM. Problem solved.

If the question were Win7 vs XP64 then the discussion would be much more interesting.

 

[JonJ678]

Fair enough, I thought it was a bigger difference than that. I'll have a look around at prices and go for whatever seems sensible based on that, inclined to think people will update the software for vista before they do for 7.

Virtualbox is worthless (for this) unfortunately, otherwise Id be running xp inside debian. it's tied to one core and can't access the graphics card directly (they're working hard on the latter), so using virtualbox would cost me 3 cores and graphics rendering. I thought compatibility mode was incapable of playing 3D games, which suggests it also won't be able to use the quadro drivers.

I think I'm going to go with vista. Most broken computers I see are running it, so the practise has got to be worth having anyway. Cheers