Vista Ultimate 4GB vs XP Pro 2GB

Tiger33 · 1 Apr 2008 at 18:23

Anyone?

im thinking of doing a switch to vista - i've been holding off for a while but im thinking of putting in a order today depending on the opinions of people here

mostly i use Web Studio CS3 (Adobe - Photoshop,Dreamweaver etc etc)
Office 2007
Firefox
Thunderbird
Visual Studio 2005 (thinking bout a upgrade to 2008)
i do some encoding to HD format and XVID format

is it worth me doing the upgrade guys?

PhillyDee · 1 Apr 2008 at 18:32

Well ultimate is a rip off tbh. Home Premium us what you want. Ultimate offers very little to justify the premium over, well, premium.

mdjmcnally · 1 Apr 2008 at 18:34

The only advantage that Ultimate would bring is ability to work with a Windows Domain, and even then it doesn't work perfectly.

Stick with Premium unless you desperately need to join a Windows AD Domain.

Tiger33 · 1 Apr 2008 at 18:35

PhillyDee said:
Well ultimate is a rip off tbh. Home Premium us what you want. Ultimate offers very little to justify the premium over, well, premium.

how about performance for the apps im using?

is it worth it for me

ps i dont really play games on my PC - i got consoles for that

NathanE · 1 Apr 2008 at 18:43

My work machine is a Pentium D 3GHz with 2GB DDR2 and XP Pro x64 and my home machine is a Core2Duo 1.8Ghz with 4GB DDR2 and Vista Ultimate x64.

My home Vista machine is several magnitudes faster.

My home machine has a RAID1 array. Not sure how much of a difference that makes, but I'd guess it helps.

Tiger33 · 1 Apr 2008 at 18:46

so i guess people are saying get vista home premium 64 with 4gb of memory - its better than xp 32bit 2gb of memory ?

for the apps i use?

Peg · 1 Apr 2008 at 18:53

Tiger33 said:
so i guess people are saying get vista home premium 64 with 4gb of memory - its better than xp 32bit 2gb of memory ?

for the apps i use?

Just make sure your Adobe software works on 64 bit. Premiere does not like 64 bit but Photoshop does, not sure about the rest.

NathanE · 1 Apr 2008 at 19:03

Tiger33 said:
so i guess people are saying get vista home premium 64 with 4gb of memory - its better than xp 32bit 2gb of memory ?

for the apps i use?

I use similar apps (VS2008 and Photoshop etc) and yes it [Vista x64 w/ 4GB] is substantially faster.

Tiger33 · 1 Apr 2008 at 19:16

NathanE said:
I use similar apps (VS2008 and Photoshop etc) and yes it [Vista x64 w/ 4GB] is substantially faster.

excellent

thanks a lot

gotta order now

need to think about what to do about raid now too ...

FatRakoon · 2 Apr 2008 at 01:40

Spanner in works time

XP32 & 2GB vs Vista64 & 4GB

I just tested a bundle of stuff and there is very little difference at all.

System I used is the following :-

Gigabyte DS3 ( F130 Bios )
GEIL 1GBx2 for XP ( And 1GBx4 for Vista )
Q6600 @ Stock
8800GTX
XFI Falal1ty
80GB Hitachi

I installed XP Pro 32Bit on one HD and Vista Prem on the other. Both up to date updates.

Differences are neither here nor there for the same system.

Tiger33 asked what the differences are for the apps he uses, and Im quite shocked that you people are telling him... "half truths".

For you mate, there wont be that much difference no...

The 64Bit O/S will help for sure with the Video encoding ( Half truth ) but then so will XP64 be a bonus there too!

As for RAID, this is really a show-off point and for your uses, its going to really be an unneccessary expense. Sure, it will help, but these days, its not really worth it.

That said and done however, get Vista64 & 4GB over XP32 and 2GB because.... Well... just because.

Tiger33 · 2 Apr 2008 at 01:47

FatRakoon said:
Spanner in works time

XP32 & 2GB vs Vista64 & 4GB

I just tested a bundle of stuff and there is very little difference at all.

System I used is the following :-

Gigabyte DS3 ( F130 Bios )
GEIL 1GBx2 for XP ( And 1GBx4 for Vista )
Q6600 @ Stock
8800GTX
XFI Falal1ty
80GB Hitachi

I installed XP Pro 32Bit on one HD and Vista Prem on the other. Both up to date updates.

Differences are neither here nor there for the same system.

Tiger33 asked what the differences are for the apps he uses, and Im quite shocked that you people are telling him... "half truths".

For you mate, there wont be that much difference no...

The 64Bit O/S will help for sure with the Video encoding ( Half truth ) but then so will XP64 be a bonus there too!

As for RAID, this is really a show-off point and for your uses, its going to really be an unneccessary expense. Sure, it will help, but these days, its not really worth it.

That said and done however, get Vista64 & 4GB over XP32 and 2GB because.... Well... just because.

the thing with raid is looking at benchmarks it looks fantastic and all that (raid 0)

but real world the differences are very small so im not sure if im gonna raid the drives this time

should i raid?

would it be better for photoshop (quicker scratch disk etc)

i take it there is no issues with partitioning a raided drive ?

Tiger33 · 2 Apr 2008 at 17:18

ok installed and partitioned -

to be honest im very impressed with vista 64 - very quick and stable for my needs

GhostlyPea · 2 Apr 2008 at 17:24

Benchmarks still show Vista being slower in file transfer speeds even after patchs/SP1 etc. Which is fine, as far im concerned it won't stop me upgrading to Vista with my next build but it is something still to think about. I don't think it will affect many people though unless you do a lot of video editing etc.

- Pea0n

lsg1r · 2 Apr 2008 at 17:55

Peg said:
Premiere does not like 64 bit but Photoshop does, not sure about the rest.

uh what are you on about, premiere pro cs3 works fine on vista 64 ultimate (I'm using it this way), admittedly its in 32bit mode but it runs fine.

Tiger33 · 3 Apr 2008 at 00:30

Pea0n said:
Benchmarks still show Vista being slower in file transfer speeds even after patchs/SP1 etc. Which is fine, as far im concerned it won't stop me upgrading to Vista with my next build but it is something still to think about. I don't think it will affect many people though unless you do a lot of video editing etc.

- Pea0n

yep i've heard that but to be honest this installation is working fantastic

i have no complains at all

if transfer are slowing then im not seeing it at all

also i've found encoding a little bit quicker?? and the overall speed of navigating the system is great

did a benchmark and i get 5.9 for everything apart from processor which gets 5.5

(stupid processor letting the system down!!

)

Tiger33 · 3 Apr 2008 at 00:32

Just to add i did run into 2 issues with Vista 64

1. my ATI graphics drivers - was unable to install the latest drivers - kept saying unable to locate inf file!! but dec 07 works great! no issues

2. no virtual image mounting software seems to work on vista - that i know of! The usual tools would not work for me (not reallly a big issue for me as i dont really have any images but i did try to install daemoon tools and magic iso or something - coudlnt create the virtual drives - but dont need them now anyway so im cool)

FatRakoon · 3 Apr 2008 at 02:05

Daemon tools works just fine.

Only issue I found with Daemon tools in 64Bit, is that in order to mount it, I had to use Daemon tools itself, while in 32Bit, you can use awxdtools to have the right-click context menu entry.

This has done this ever since I found Daemon tools and its the same in XP and Vista.

Tiger33 · 3 Apr 2008 at 08:17

FatRakoon said:
Daemon tools works just fine.

Only issue I found with Daemon tools in 64Bit, is that in order to mount it, I had to use Daemon tools itself, while in 32Bit, you can use awxdtools to have the right-click context menu entry.

This has done this ever since I found Daemon tools and its the same in XP and Vista.

sadly i couldnt get daemoon tools working

it kept setting itself to drive G: - which is my external :-(

and i coudlnt change the drive letter for daemon tools

NathanE · 3 Apr 2008 at 09:19

FatRakoon said:
Spanner in works time

XP32 & 2GB vs Vista64 & 4GB

I just tested a bundle of stuff and there is very little difference at all.

System I used is the following :-

Gigabyte DS3 ( F130 Bios )
GEIL 1GBx2 for XP ( And 1GBx4 for Vista )
Q6600 @ Stock
8800GTX
XFI Falal1ty
80GB Hitachi

I installed XP Pro 32Bit on one HD and Vista Prem on the other. Both up to date updates.

Differences are neither here nor there for the same system.

Tiger33 asked what the differences are for the apps he uses, and Im quite shocked that you people are telling him... "half truths".

For you mate, there wont be that much difference no...

The 64Bit O/S will help for sure with the Video encoding ( Half truth ) but then so will XP64 be a bonus there too!

As for RAID, this is really a show-off point and for your uses, its going to really be an unneccessary expense. Sure, it will help, but these days, its not really worth it.

That said and done however, get Vista64 & 4GB over XP32 and 2GB because.... Well... just because.

Sorry but with all due I disagree entirely.

RAID isn't just a "show off" point. Read almost any benchmark and you will see there are massive gains to be had. Whether outright throughput performance with RAID 0 or reliability and concurrency with RAID 1.

With the type of work he is doing (Photoshop, Visual Studio development) a RAID array is definately going to show him gains. If nothing else a RAID 1 array ensures a certain amount of reliability and trust he can have in his system.

And again for the type of work he is doing a x64 system will be more stable, perform faster in general (and no it's not the type of performance you can just go away to "benchmark") But most importantly, if he wants to utilise 4GB of RAM (which really is pretty much a minimum requirement for any new development/photo editing machine these days) then he *will* need an x64 OS to take full advantage of the memory.

I dare you to rerun your "benchmarks" in the following way:

- Open up a large Visual Studio project with >500 classes and open about 10 of them on screen.

- Have some music playing as most developers do.

- Have Photoshop open with a couple small'ish images open.

- Have 30 days uptime on the machine, and throw in any other desktop apps that can reasonably be used at the same time as the above apps (IE, Notepad, Explorer etc..)

Now compare XP Pro with 2GB against Vista x64 with 4GB...

But bare in mind there is no benchmark software capable of running an automated test to meaningfully assess this kind of performance. To do any kind of meaningful test you will have to get your stopwatch out and literally time the length of time it takes to do things manually.

Peg · 3 Apr 2008 at 14:17

lsg1r said:
uh what are you on about, premiere pro cs3 works fine on vista 64 ultimate (I'm using it this way), admittedly its in 32bit mode but it runs fine.

You have the same problem as me. It does not run on 64 bit you have to run it in 32 bit mode. That's what I'm on about.