Vista Bus.64 or XP Pro on VMWare fusion

I am going to be loading VMWare fusion on my new Mac Pro for two photography applications that don't have Mac Versions. One is called Express digital, which is used in conjunction with my lab to catalog weddings and upload them to a gallery where people can order images from the weddings and portraits. The other is Fotofusion which is used to build digital wedding albums. I use the Mac version of CS4. Anyway, I have both Vista Business 64 and an old version of XP Pro. Any preference? It seems like Vista 64 might be a little faster, but that is just my guess?

Unlikely. Vista has a much larger overall footprint than XP. Benchmarks usually give XP a performance advantage. Vista 64 is great if you need to address more than 4GB of memory, however - otherwise, it has no fundamental advantage over XP.

cwa107 said:

Vista 64 is great if you need to address more than 4GB of memory, however - otherwise, it has no fundamental advantage over XP.

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Since I do have more than 4g of memory in the Mac Pro should I then use vista to optimize that?
Thanks.

Do your applications need that much memory?

cwa107 said:

Do your applications need that much memory?

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I would assume the wedding album design software might, since it will be handling hi-rez image files.

Based on my experience Vista almost never gives a performance advantage over XP other than games optimized for it. XP uses so much less overhead that it is really inherently faster, and the 64 bits seldom matters as most apps just aren't built for it. I would install XP to be honest. Just one man's opinion. I use it in Fusion and it's great.