You couldn't pay me to run Vista. I still have yet to hear anyone give me even ONE reason or tell me of one feature that makes it better than XP. Given all the problems with drivers (which are slowly getting fixed); the slowness; and most importantly the big-brother intrusiveness and the bloat and slowness that comes with it, I'd recommend getting XP.

Turns out, Microsoft offers (I think this is still available) a downgrade program that lets you purchase XP for your laptop for a trivial fee. This downgrade was available with earlier Microsoft O/S, but with the possible exception of Windows ME, there has never been a compelling need to go backwards, until now.

You can Google Microsoft XP Downgrade or simply go here and read about it:

Microsoft Offering Vista-to-XP Downgrade Option to Anyone, Not Just OEMs

Thank you for the feed back.

Hi,

I belong to the same category, there is no reason, nor any amount of money that would bribe me to switch to Vista.

However - I am forced to do just that - if I wan't to run Vegas 64 bit !!! SCS provides NO option, non whatsoever. Vegas 64 bit is a no go on XP x64.

What a pity. Mildly put.

Christian

I have been running Vista as long as I have Vegas 8
I actually like Vista. I have my share of problems with V8, especially with my Q6600 and the memory (fill up) problems which have been discussed here before, and which I do not attribute to Vista.

Many of the people putting Vista down are not actually using the OS.
For me it runs just as good as XP.

Its kinda like the folks who are still running V7d vs V8. At some point the bugs will be worked out and V8 along with Vista will be the way to go.....


Ted

In my opinion, Vista is an answer to a question no has been asking.

If MS were to put Vista side-by-side with XPpro as a purchase option, I think 90% of the sales would go to XP. But MS doesn't sell that way--if you buy a new PC, you get Vista (with very few exceptions).

We just bought a laptop for my college-bound daughter. I found a Dell D420 on the Dell business website that offered 5+ hours of battery life, XPpro, and a 3.5 lb weight for--ta da!-- $620! The machine runs beautifully and she is happy to have found a machine with XP.

If you are willing to experiment a bit, contact your vendor and see if XP drivers are even available for your machine. They're not officially an option for many laptops, but industrious users on the Internet seem to have found the bits and pieces needed to run XP on a variety of platforms. For example, my itty-bitty Sony UX-380n palmtop sells with Vista, period. But a user website guy has put together a disk with all the drivers needed for XP. On Vista, my 380n was a dog. With XP, it's very, very nice.

I have been running Vista as long as I have Vegas 8I assume that you know Vegas 8 does not require Vista. It runs fine on XP, SP2.

Vegas 8 System Requirements

I know that John.
But when I build my latest computer last summer I decided to go the Vista route. So when V8 came out I popped it on that box.
Don't get me wrong Vista had its quircks, from the get go, and few people seem to like it. Right now it is running pretty smooth for me.
Although I have my share of problems with Vegas, I feel pretty comfortable with Vista, and the problems I see with Vegas appear to be on both the XP and Vista platforms.

I run Vegas on both Vista 32 and 64.

I'm with CorTed... I like Vista and have had no problems. On my 64 machine I run 8 gig ram with no page file and it seems to be a bit smoother and faster.

The truth is... most people that shoot down Vista haven't even really tried it.

I've got Vista on quite a few machines here. Of those machines, typically the desktops have Vista64 and the laptops have Vista32. Vista has gotten a bad reputation but, from my experience, it is unjustified. I have no compaints.

Has anyone run into any issues moving a veg file between Vista and XP?

No problems.

I'm running Vegas 7 & 8 on XP SP2 on single core Pentium's. I'm running 8 on Core 2 Duo Vista box. The only problem has been Apple QT and the SCS KB had a link to every prior version of QT that solved the problem.

Tomorrow I have a $499 (Fry's) refurbished HP Q6600 arriving and there is no XP driver for the Q6600 that I'm aware of. My refurbished HP's have been better than my new Dell's going back to 2000.

No probs between veggies from XP to Vista. I actually like Vista better than XP. Maybe its the quadcore that sits well with it. I find my XP laptop kinda a looks like win98 did when XP first came out.

But as the saying goes..if it ain't broke.....

Cheers

I actually like Vista better than XPJust out of curiosity, why? Is it faster? Does it have some feature you really like that didn't exist in XP? Or do you just like the "look" better? I have really tried hard, both by reading and by asking questions, to figure out a reason to want to upgrade. I can see lots of reasons why an IT person would want to upgrade, and I can see a huge number of reasons why movie and music companies would want me to upgrade (tighter control of what I can do with their copyrighted material), but I'll be darned if I can figure out what's in it for me.

"Just out of curiosity, why? Is it faster?"

How about the simple fact that Vegas 64 will not support Xp64.

It's clear that software manufacturers will continue to support xp32 for a little while yet, but as far as 64 bit apps go it's a done deal. Xp64 is being left behind in the dust. If you want to run Vegas 64 on an officially supported OS then you have no choice but to switch up.

But I also like the detailed error reporting in Vista, bit locker, faster search, and the fact that Vista loads/shuts down about 3 times as fast as xp ever did.

And tighter control of copyrighted material.... as far as I can see, that's a fear mongerer's line that's fast becoming old. I have yet to run into a situation where Vista has not let me do something (legal or otherwise). Notwithstanding, if you're doing things above board it's not something that you will have to worry about anyway. You might as well get used to it because it's happening all over.... and not just with Microsoft.

I run Vegas on Vista 64 and the only problem is with the color selection in the chroma key. I have had to develop a new method. Other than that, Vista 64 has been no problem for me. I actually like it.

Key tools for me like Camtasia run just fine. Paintshop Pro runs fine. Photoshop will not.

I move projects from the vista machine to the XP machine with no problem at all.

Vegas 8 is running pretty flawlessly for me in Vista Ultimate64. A 64 bit OS like this is the only way to make use of 4 gig or ram or more.

What do you use all that RAM for?
I can see where it's needed in application servers but for Joe Average?

Bob.

At risk of sounding like a broken record (note to under-30 users: consult an older person about the definition of "record"), I repeat that one can easily determine just how much ram is actually needed by installing RamPage, a freeware utility that sits in the System Tray. I have 2GB of ram installed, and I very rarely run over just 1GB of actual ram use running V7 even on my general-purpose, 73-processes-running-the-background PC. The only time I eat up ram is when I am running multiple instances of DeShaker alongside Vegas.

Extra ram's not that expensive, but if it's never used, what's the point? Of course, others may be running apps that really need it, but the only way to know for sure is to monitor usage with utilities like RamPage.

Hmm ... 64-bit seems to be the common thread of reasons to switch to Vista. Problem is, has anyone done any benchmarking to see if this makes any real performance difference? I've been through a bunch of these transitions before. The leap from 8-bit to 16-bit was big, but 16-bit to 32-bit was much less of a big deal. I know more than a little bit about computer architecture and what it actually means to have a larger directly addressable memory space, and it is hard for me to see how it will really improve much of anything that we do.

I have been wrong before, so I am certainly not going to make predictions, but I am definitely very skeptical.

For instance, where are all the glowing articles about how applications X, Y, or Z are now running ten times faster under Vista? If not 10x, how about 2x? How about anything? Especially given the overhead, I just don't see how it is going to happen.

As for faster boot times, that is an interesting one, since that was initially one of the key selling features for XP. Most people never saw that improvement because the computer companies loaded up the computer with boatloads of bloatware that had to load. I've stripped my computer, and I can begin work approximately 35 seconds after I press the on switch. Is Vista faster than this? Can you begin work in 10 seconds from a cold boot (standby is not a cold boot)?

(BTW, I just spent several hours preparing to give away some of my older Win95/98 computers. In stripping them down and wiping the hard drives, I was amazed at how fast they boot -- much faster than any modern computer).

So, I am looking for benchmarks from independent individuals (not affiliated with any O/S or application vendor) that show significant performance improvements with Vista compared to XP. I sure haven't seen them, and I bet they don't exist because if they did, EVERYONE who had Vista would be raving about the performance improvement the way we did back in the 1980s when the first disk cache programs hit the market (remember Super PCKwik?), or the amazing jump in performance with the first 386 processors.

Vegas uses the extra RAM for photo animation and ram render previews. It also uses it for buffering back to the iframes on m2t HDV which helps a lot if you have lots of small m2t clips on the timeline.

Aside from video editing I also work with music. I typically use Reason4 with some rather large sample libraries rewired into either Acid or Traction. Reason loads it's instrument samples into RAM instead of buffering them to hard disc and I find that this is a better approach for laptop users like me. 4 gig of RAM lets Reason use a full 2 gig and finally has enough room for the sample sets I like to use on a typical tune.

My laptop is topped out with 4 GB of RAM which was dirt cheap directly from Kingston.com. If my laptop would take more I would have it.

This conversation reminds me of an experience I had a few years ago. I went out and spent about $500 on one of the first one gigabyte hard drives. At the time it was quite a milestone.

Just after I got it, one of my friends at work gave me a speach that went something like this: "You are just crazy! You could take a word processor and write all day every day and still never fill that thing up!. That night I went home and tried to bounce for audio tracks together on one of the early versions of SAW so that I could add a vocal and a few more tracks. After a lengthly period of waiting for the bounce, I got a crash and a "disc full" error message. I had run out of space on my first project on my first day with the silly thing.

64-bit and hard drive size are not exactly the same thing. You are exactly correct about the "I'll never need all that space." I think we've all experienced the same thing.

However, increasing addressable address space is more tied to the physics of the applications. In particular, the reason there were such big improvements going from 8- to 16-bit is that there were LOTS of data structures (arrays that hold data that your application uses) that couldn't fit into memory at one time, and therefore had to be swapped out to disk. For instance, if you couldn't fit a photo into RAM memory, it had to be swapped out. Various file systems (like Flashpix) were invented to get around this limitation. So, when the hardware and software architecture permitted the CPU to directly addresses more memory (which is one of the main benefits to a higher-order bit computer system), the applications suddenly got a HUGE turbo boost. Not subtle at all.

So, I don't know if any of the current Vegas operations are RAM-bound. It is possible that some of the new 32-bit operations in Vegas 8 are, but I don't know. If they are, then perhaps the 64-bit version will be a big deal. If not ... well, we'll all see the benchmarks next fall.