I have seen nothing to indicate that the operating system has a determining effect on Vegas performance. None.

You hardware on the other hand, isn't everything; it is the only thing.

The OS doesn't really matter, the biggest thing to speed up your system would be a better GPU.

@LynMil From the options you have listed, none would be faster than the other where Vegas Pro is concerned..... Therefore creating a dual boot option would be pointless for what you are trying to achieve.

I'm curious if Vegas would run on a "lite" Windows OS.

But run better? Hardware takes care of that, and proxy files.

I recently read that Windows 11 tends to provide better performance over Win10 due to improved handling of multi-core CPU workloads. Now in real-life I'm typically more concerned with software compatibility and tend to hold off migrating to newer released OSes where these type of incompatibilities are still being resolved on the OS and software app development side. With my recent laptop purchase, against my better judgement I decided to move forward with using Windows 11. The jury is still out if that is a good decision or not. I'll know more once I start installing all my A/V apps, plugins and start using them to see if I'm greeted with any unanticipated grief. There's always that risk to take into consideration with apps like VP19 was not developed or tested on Win11 where compatibility tends to be a higher concern over performance.

"unanticipated grief" LOL, That's a funny one @Rednroll.... Me, i aint touching Windows 11 with a long stick anytime or anywhere soon.... I follow the old adage: "stick to what works", and 10 & 7 does just that.

@Steve_Rhoden I hated the move from Win 7 to 10. But then, after a few years, 10 settled down. I'm on Win11 Pro now, not a fan of it. But the word is, it is suppose to handle multi-core/thread CPU's better. I changed hardware when I went to Win 11, so really can't say.

@Reyfox Yeah, that's the big mistake many users make. They upgrade Windows OS, but not their system hardware. You cannot upgrade Windows on the very same old hardware and expect to see big changes and improvements.

"unanticipated grief" LOL, That's a funny one @Rednroll.... Me, i aint touching Windows 11 with a long stick anytime or anywhere soon.... I follow the old adage: "stick to what works", and 10 & 7 does just that.

LOL Yeah! I hear ya! I'm currently at that crossroad.. I purchased a new laptop recently. My initial thoughts was to stick with what I know works and I installed Win10 on it although all the laptop drivers said was for Win11. After installing Win10 and getting setup, I noticed new laptop performance was lower than expected. So as a troubleshooting step I went back and did a fresh install of Win11. The performance issue I was experiencing ended up being something else related to a bad battery and had to return the laptop. What I did notice between the Win10 vs Win11 installs was that the Realtek audio driver didn't properly install on the Win10 system. So now leaning towards the thought, "Maybe I should stick with Win11 to avoid driver compatibility issues"?

Current situation is that I now have fresh installs of Win10 and Win11 SSD image backups and waiting for the laptop to come back from repair and need to decide which I should move forward with when laptop arrives back. I kind of feel I'm being forced towards Win11 or potentially have to deal with non officially supported hardware driver related issues sticking with Win10.

For a fresh install on modern hardware I would (and did) go with Windows 11 at will be supported for longer.

Red pill or Blue Pill? LOL!

After many editors spend hundreds of dollars over time on NLE and addons, I'm already surprised at the stinginess in hardware and operating system. 

I re-read the OP’s question. It seems we all missed the question. They are referring to special builds non official MS supported OS versions. My understanding of these is they strip out services so they aren’t running in the background and can’t be run, thus the associated names “lite”. Seems to be a popular thing to do in the gaming community.

This would be a very unwise thing to do IMHO where there’s a much better approach to performing system tweaks if that’s what you’re into. OP mentioned they were unsuccessful completing Vegas registration with one of these OSes. Well yeah, a service used for that task may have been stripped out from the OS to make it lighter. So good luck figuring that one out. The OS you're running should now always default to the likely cause of the problem and not Vegas.

The better approach IMHO if you want to cut down on unneeded resources from running is to install the official version then disable them in MS config. That way if you run into issues, you can go turn them back on…they haven’t been stripped away, they just been manually disabled and being prevented from running.

An app like CCleaner Pro is good at assisting doing tweaks like this since it provides a more user friendly interface but it’s not doing things which can’t already be done manually with not so user friendly interfaces under task manager, registry editing, and ms config, etc adjustments. I've done a lot of this back in the WinXP days, but now just stick to disabling things from auto running on startup and disable them using CCleaner Pro when I notice they're running in the background and consuming a lot of resources. Then if I run into any unexpected problems just fire CCleaner back up and re-enable items until that problem goes away. You can't do that with these special build OSes which are made for folks who don't have knowledge in these areas by folks who may or may not understand what they're disabling and stripping out. They're just looking at checking to see if most common feature items still work and the system seems to run faster because other items have been turned off and stripped out from running in the background.

The reason OP got an "out of licenses" message is because a dual boot was implemented and an active license was attempted on both partitions and came up 1 license short. The Windows Device ID (Windows settings: System/About) is what's widely used to uniquely identify machines for licensing. Not just the Desktop name which would be trivial to circumvent. Device ID comes up different for each boot partition. Also comes up different after upgrading win10 to win11 on the same partition. When at your license limit, best to deactivate the working registration (via the Vegas help menu) in the 1st boot partition before trying to activate it in the 2nd partition

Then there is the M$ spying collecting data.... Most don't bother are aren't aware what M$ is doing in the background and what info it's gathering. Watch this .

I did quite a bit of research and Phoenix LiteOS is one of the more Legit Lite OS creators. But if the problems with the X-Lite I installed were not enough, take a look at their Privacy Policy (especially the PERSISTENT Cookies) before you gripe about M$ spying:

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