Vista or XP for Dev Machine

Question

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 use Vista x64 on my primary development machine. It runs everything from Visual Studio 6.0 through 2008 with no trouble.

It's not a giant leap forward, but I prefer it to XP.

If you ever need XP for anything, Virtual PC is free and works well. I keep an XP VPC image handy for testing in XP, IIS6, and IE6. The best of both worlds.

Of course, you could always get Windows Mojave instead!

In response to the question edit: I used Vista x86 for about 6 months before switching to x64. Same opinion.

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.

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

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 4

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 5

Although Vista doesn't "support" Visual Studio 2003 it does work fine - I spent a year working on web-forms, win-forms & windows service projects using .net 1.1 in VS2003 without any problems. MS have an issues list at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/vs2005/bb188244.aspx

Vista64 would definately be my choice.

Answer 6

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 7

There is another option: Windows 2008:

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

I thought it was interesting.

Answer 8

It really depends on what sort of development you're doing. If you're doing something that requires massive amounts of memory & resources (huge datasets and lots of math), XP is the way to go. Even if you lose some of the memory by not running x64, you're still gaining about 750mb that would otherwise be chewed up by a lot of the Vista background services.

If you're doing web development, it depends on your testing environment. If you do everything locally using IIS & VS.NET, it doesn't really matter. VS has it's own webserver built in. If you have to test on IIS, it's handy to keep a virtual machine around to throw it onto a 2003 server. Keep in mind that Vista will eat up some of that memory that could be used for a virtual machine.

Given your list of requirements, I would have to recommend going with XP Pro. If you're a heavy multitasker, you need all of your resources in front of you, not being chewed up by the Aero and background searching. I used Vista for development for about 8 months, then I got a new job where I had XP. At first it was annoying, but the responsiveness of XP trumped the features of Vista, especially when there are tons of windows open and all my RAM is gone.

There is also a compatibility issue: a lot of VS.NET (especially older versions) are fairly... difficult under Vista. For instance, the publish feature for web sites can be broken under Vista. You also have to be careful about how to deal with the UAC, as some VS.NET stuff requires you to explicitly run as Administrator. I also recall having some difficulty with Microsoft Virtual Machine, but this was in 2007. I'm sure that's patched up by now.

Answer 9

if you do web, iis 7 rocks the house, being able to have multiple hosts on one box has been a life saver for me, I don't know how to go back to xp anymore.

If I had to go back, server 2003 is the least I would accept, not having a real functional web server is just not an option.

Answer 10

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 11

I'll add my voice to those saying Vista is more than adequate. I'm using a mix of several OS's and Vista Ultimate is my favorite by far. Quad core 2.5 with 4gb. Haven't upgraded to x64 yet.

Answer 12

If you run into problems with Vista and Visual Studio 2003 or 2005, try running it as administrator (Right-click, Run as Administrator). That solves the vast majority of the issues, especially when working with IIS, BizTalk, etc.

Answer 13

I'd say go for vista.. IIS7 is great, and the memory allocation is smarter (Vista doesn't waste RAM, it fills it with what it thinks you will use in the near future). As for the background services... you can turn them off like you could in XP.

However... if the rest of the company is on XP, I strongly suggest you install an XP virtual machine so that you can test your apps on the same platform as everyone else.

Answer 14

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.)

Answer 15

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 16

I have just purchased a new 'barebones' box that came with Vista as the OS. I was apprehensive, having heard much bad press over time about Vista, but it runs just fine here.

On that basis, I'd say save the extra money you (probably) get charged for the "downgrade" and buy some more RAM instead.

Answer 17

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