Vista 64bit with 4gb ram or XP with only 3gb usable ram?

[jthg]

I currently have a computer with 4gb of ram and windows xp pro as the OS. As far as I can tell, I won't be able to squeeze out more than 3gb of usable ram in that setup. My other obvious option (the cpu is Core 2) is to install Vista 64bit. That should get me the full 4gb, but with the talk of the memory overhead of Vista, could I be better off just taking the 3gb in XP? There are a lot of performance benchmarks for Vista, but I haven't been able to find any that show how much more memory Vista uses than XP.

On a side note, how's driver support for Vista 64bit these days?

I use the computer for a moderate amount of gaming, some 3D graphics programming, and I run virtual machines for various purposes (testing, server, etc).

Thanks for any info.

 

[bsobel]

Use Vista64

 

[uclaLabrat]

Isn't memory usage with vista much better? It probably has more over head then XP but precaching is quite good.

 

[pontifex]

i ran xp with 4 gb ram installed then switched to vista 64 home premium. i noticed that things ran much faster on vista.

 

[Canterwood]

If you can wait it out for a while keep XP and go straight to Windows 7 next year.

I'd miss Vista altogether this late in the game tbh.

 

[Mem]

Originally posted by: Canterwood
If you can wait it out for a while keep XP and go straight to Windows 7 next year.

I'd miss Vista altogether this late in the game tbh.

Another option is get Vista SP1 then upgrade to SP2 next year then miss Win7 and go straight to Win8 down the road .


As a gamer I'm very happy with Vista x64 with 4GB,solid OS in my experience.

 

[evident]

vista64 will make you happy

 

[Canterwood]

Originally posted by: Mem

Originally posted by: Canterwood
If you can wait it out for a while keep XP and go straight to Windows 7 next year.

I'd miss Vista altogether this late in the game tbh.

Another option is get Vista SP1 then upgrade to SP2 next year then miss Win7 and go straight to Win8 down the road .

I think migrating to Vista now is a waste tbh.

Vista is a two year old OS about to be superseded in 2009 by Win7 which will offer improvements over it and be supported that much longer.

I'm not saying Vista is crap, but I think the once the Win7 bandwagon starts rolling next year, then no-one will care about Vista anymore.

 

[jthg]

Thanks for the responses. It's nice to know that people have had good experiences gaming in Vista 64bit.

Originally posted by: Canterwood

Originally posted by: Mem

Originally posted by: Canterwood
If you can wait it out for a while keep XP and go straight to Windows 7 next year.

I'd miss Vista altogether this late in the game tbh.

Another option is get Vista SP1 then upgrade to SP2 next year then miss Win7 and go straight to Win8 down the road .

I think migrating to Vista now is a waste tbh.

Vista is a two year old OS about to be superseded in 2009 by Win7 which will offer improvements over it and be supported that much longer.

I'm not saying Vista is crap, but I think the once the Win7 bandwagon starts rolling next year, then no-one will care about Vista anymore.

The flaw I see in that is that Windows 7 probably won't be released until late 2009. Then give it 6 months for bugs and incompatibilities to settle down and we're talking about early 2010. More than a year is quite a bit of time in my mind.

 

[Mem]

Originally posted by: Canterwood

Originally posted by: Mem

Originally posted by: Canterwood
If you can wait it out for a while keep XP and go straight to Windows 7 next year.

I'd miss Vista altogether this late in the game tbh.

Another option is get Vista SP1 then upgrade to SP2 next year then miss Win7 and go straight to Win8 down the road .

I think migrating to Vista now is a waste tbh.

Vista is a two year old OS about to be superseded in 2009 by Win7 which will offer improvements over it and be supported that much longer.

I'm not saying Vista is crap, but I think the once the Win7 bandwagon starts rolling next year, then no-one will care about Vista anymore.

Vista will be around for a quite awhile especially when you consider what Win7 is based on ,driver wise as well,personally Win8 is the one I'm waiting for,a whole new OS redesigned from the ground up,nothing wrong with Win7 but its not a major upgrade or change compared to Vista from what I have seen,being 2 years old is a good thing its becoming mature like XP...we all know new OS brings new problems and bugs,anyway each to their own as they say.

 

[Canterwood]

The fact Win7 has a lot in common with Vista is why I think it wont be that bad at release.
At least nothing like the problems Vista had to start with.

A lot has been learnt with Vista, and that will only help with the development of Win7 imo.

If Win8 is a whole new redesigned OS, then that will bring its own troubles and pain once more, and I'll probably miss it altogether or wait a year or so for a service pack.

But as you say each to their own, and I think we've hijacked this thread enough already.

 

[Mem]

Originally posted by: Canterwood
The fact Win7 has a lot in common with Vista is why I think it wont be that bad at release.
At least nothing like the problems Vista had to start with.

A lot has been learnt with Vista, and that will only help with the development of Win7 imo.

If Win8 is a whole new redesigned OS, then that will bring its own troubles and pain once more, and I'll probably miss it altogether or wait a year or so for a service pack.

But as you say each to their own, and I think we've hijacked this thread enough already.

Win8 is also supposed to be the first OS by Microsoft in 64 bit format only( no 32 bit option,about time in my books)...as to what has been learnt or not as the case may be,we shall see.

Getting right back on topic,

On a side note, how's driver support for Vista 64bit these days?

In my experience drivers are solid and I've 64 bit drivers for all my hardware with Vista x64,I do some beta testing too as a gamer and again Vista x64 has been solid as an OS in that department,problems so far with closed beta games are game bugs(as you would expect).

 

[SketchMaster]

Except for a bad stick of RAM I've had no major issues with going to Vista x64 over the past week, a few little bugs here are there with 3rd party apps that are 32bit but nothing that made me think going to V64 was a bad idea. So far all my games I play run fine, though some of them failed to put an icon on the desktop after install but making a shortcut by hand seems to work just fine.

I did run into an issue with 3dmark 06 not wanting to install but oh well...

So pretty much, there are still some growing pains but not nearly as many as with XP x64 when I tried it a few years back. V64 will use more RAM than 32bit (~200MB) but DDR2 is cheap enough that you can grab another 4GB for >$60 and have way more overhead than you will need for the next two years.