Share your Vista 64bit experiences

Question

I've got a Dell XPS M1330 with a 2.2ghz processor, 4gig ram, GeForce 8400M, and a 64GB SSD disk.

I'm primarily doing web-development, sharepoint development, integration (Microsoft BI tools) and biztalk. I use virtual machines for these purposes. I've been using Vista 32Bit up until now but I'm considering moving to 64bit to squeeze that little extra ram out of the box.

I'd like to hear if anyone has been using 64bit vista under the same circumstances and if anything should hold me back. Have in mind that this is the laptop I use at work.

Answer 1

I have recently switched from a Vista 32 bit development machine to a Vista 64 bit development machine, with a quad-core intel processor, and 6gb of ram. THe performance improvements have been quite impressive, and thus far, no "issues" with any development tools that I have been using.

Answer 2

I have a fully-loaded Thinkpad W500 with Vista 64 and it runs flawlessly, especially since VMWare Workstation now supports both 32-bit and 64-bit host workstations. The only issue I encountered was with Python. I simply could not get a 64-bit version working and ended up using the 32-bit version under WOW.

Answer 3

Skipped Vista x64 and moved straight to Win2k8 with 8gb RAM and a handful of disks. Smaller memory footprint with less crap preinstalled. RAM is cheap these days too - more you throw at the problem the fast it runs.

Hyper-V is pretty good too - use it host instances of Win2k8 and Win2k3, some larger VMs (>3Gb RAM) with tools, some smaller (1Gb RAM) ones with services.

Answer 4

I'm running a custom Intel(R) Core(TM)2 CPU 6600 @ 2.40GHz, 8.00 GB, NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT, with a 300gb raid 0 with 15mb cache on Vista 64. Only been on it a month, but it is fast and stable, with no compatibility issues.

Answer 5

I'm running a Dell XPS 1730 with Vista 64 (4GB Ram, 2x512Mb Graphics). Runs Vista64 very nicely! I can have 4 or 5 instances of VS2005 up and notice no degradation. I had no issues with 64bit drivers either. Personally, I can't think of a reason not to use Vista64 on a dev machine if your hardware is new...

Answer 6

Vista x64 SP1, HP Quad Core with 4GB RAM. Works flawlessly. Any apps not available in 64-bit ofcourse work fine under WoW64. My only complain is IE has to run in 32-bit because of the missing 64-bit Flash plugin. And if you are a Developer, you should know that Visual Studio also is not available in 64-bit.