Vista Or XP With Bootcamp?

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Do you guys recommend using vista or XP for boot camp. I will be using windows mostly for gaming, but was wondering how stable vista is at the moment.

Also, If I format one of my hard drives to be XP, and then decide I would like Vista instead, can the drive be repartioned without losing data or will I have to erase all my windows data.

I am running a Mac Pro with 4 gigs of RAM, 3 500g HDD's, 3.2 ghz, 8800 GT

Thanks
 
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With a Mac Pro, I'd have to say Vista simply for DirectX 10.
 
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Vista definitely, why would you try to use an old os with a new hardware?? that's going backward. I've been using vista and haven't found a single problem. Despite what anyone says, go with Vista.
 
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Vista is fairly stable now, though I still get random issues with it on the PC I have it loaded on. Keeping it running for extended periods of time and it acts up. Vista SP1 is out now and will be pushed to users later this month - that may change things either way.

With the horsepower you have in a Mac Pro I'd say Vista.
 
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How about MacBook Pro? Vista or XP Home or Pro?
 
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How about MacBook Pro? Vista or XP Home or Pro?

The MacBook Pro has a dedicated video card so the Aero interface should run ok. That's the prime culprit for performance problems, though you can run Vista in a basic UI mode that is less taxing if your system bogs down.

I also highly recommend at least 3GB of RAM (I run 4) because Windows in a VM works much better with 1 to 1.5GB of RAM dedicated to it.
 
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While the MBP's have DX10-capable videocards (8600GT), it's a 'crippled' 128-bit card that is mediocre on performance. If you are considering Vista simply for DX10 gaming you may be disappointed.

It also is a factor of how much disk space you plan to allocate to Windows. Vista is hefty and depending on the version you install it can take up to about 15GB of space just for the initial install. If your Windows partition will be small, this is a serious consideration. XP on the other hand sits in around 5GB.

Aero is nice and all but I feel it's a bit too much in the way. I also think Vista's high overhead is detrimental, especially for things like virtualization (which I dabble in) since the amount of RAM and disk space Vista takes is one less virtual machine I can run.

I'm a fan of XP64, since it gives 64-bit happiness with XP's familiar lower overhead.
 
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Are you ever going to want to run Windows in Parallels?

I went with XP on a new MBP because the hardware would run Vista fine when I boot camp but if I am running Parallels Vista would eat up more resources than I want to give up from OS X.
 
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The obvious choice is Windows XP if you want most of your Windows software to actually work. Even if you game a lot, DirectX10 really hasn't been taken advantage of at all yet, and I don't expect it to be for a while. Even Crysis, the flagship title for DirectX10's superiority over DirectX9, can be altered to have the "Very High" settings work on Windows XP, more efficiently than in Windows Vista (not that your computer will be capable of running it at max settings anyway; there doesn't exist a video card powerful enough to do Crysis at max settings yet... it uses resources rather inefficiently in general).
 
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I run Vista with Aero on my Macbook just fine.
 
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Not wanting to hog timetoknow's thread here. But really the only reason I was considering Vista was for the looks. I'm not a gamer so anything to do with gaming is no issue to me.
 
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Vista, definitely. It runs very well on my MBP - no crashes, no BSOD's and all the drivers are right there on the Leopard disk...install is a breeze. Also Vista supports more memory than XP and does look much better than XP. I'm not knocking XP as it is a solid OS that I run on many machines at work, but MS will eventually discontinue support for XP so Vista will outlast it in terms of future support/updates. A year ago I would have said stay away from Vista because it's new and unstable, but that has changed now - it's very stable and SP1 is out now which fixes a lot of issues customers may have had.
 
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Vista, definitely. It runs very well on my MBP - no crashes, no BSOD's and all the drivers are right there on the Leopard disk...install is a breeze. Also Vista supports more memory than XP and does look much better than XP. I'm not knocking XP as it is a solid OS that I run on many machines at work, but MS will eventually discontinue support for XP so Vista will outlast it in terms of future support/updates. A year ago I would have said stay away from Vista because it's new and unstable, but that has changed now - it's very stable and SP1 is out now which fixes a lot of issues customers may have had.

Vista does not support more memory than XP.

32 bit operating systems can only address 3gb of ram. 64 bit OS's can support more than that.

32 bit Vista will still only be able to support 3 gigs of ram.

Again, OP: Are you going to be virtualizing Windows or running it in Boot Camp?

Boot Camp - Vista
Virtual - XP
Both - XP
 
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32 bit operating systems can only address 3gb of ram. 64 bit OS's can support more than that.

32 bit Vista will still only be able to support 3 gigs of ram.

What does this mean ? Having 3GB\4GB RAM will endup as 3GB for Vista ?

If yes ? Any reason why so ?
 
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32 bit operating systems can only address 3gb of ram. 64 bit OS's can support more than that.

32 bit Vista will still only be able to support 3 gigs of ram.

What does this mean ? Having 3GB\4GB RAM will endup as 3GB for Vista ?

If yes ? Any reason why so ?

32Bit Operating systems only utilize up to 3gb of RAM. If your computer has more then that it won't register within the OS itself making the purchase of additional RAM pointless unless you plan to upgrade to 64bit.
 
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Since the issue of RAM has been brought up... What about Leopard... How much RAM will it support? Just curious...
 
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I run Vista with Aero on my Macbook just fine.

tmorgan, are you doing this via boot camp or VM? I have been trying to get Aero to run on my MBP with no luck at all. I am trying to run it in Fusion though, so that may be the issue!
 
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