XP 64 bit or Vista 64 bit quicker?

Which 64 bit OS optimizes 4GB (800MHz) of RAM (T9400, 9600M GT, and 7k320 if that helps) better? I'm going to using it mainly for Flash, Premiere and After Effects.

I've heard that Vista eats a bit more RAM, and in my head that registers as wasted RAM, but perhaps it's put to good use and I'm wrong. And perhaps Vista can optimize my apps in other ways... I have no idea.

Also, I know that Windows 7 is on the horizon, but Microsoft has revealed that it won't be finished for a couple years...

If there's not much of a difference between these two 64 bits, besides their user interfaces, please tell me!

 

Vista 64-bit has much much much better support, driver-wise, software-wise, etc. It's also more stable than XP 64-bit. XP was rewritten in 64-bit as a sort of afterthought, while Vista 64-bit is better optimized, and is also more widely adopted.

Go for Vista 64-bit.

 

Vista 64bit is definetly better than XP 64bit.
-drivers are updated more frequently in Vista 64bit OS thus highly likely giving you better performance
-Adobe release updates for Vista more than Windows XP 64bit thus also giving you more stability, possibally more features, and more performance.
-Since you have up to date hardware, Vista should run faster than XP because it's optimized fo rit.

Though, I'd recommend you to either turn off unused services and startup programs or vlite the windows vista 64bit OS. After Effects uses up ram pretty quickly.

 

Windows Vista x64.

 

I was under the impression that XP was more stable until you reminded me that Vista was optimized for 64 bit, unlike XP, anyways. Thanks.

 

Even is 32-bit, Vista is much better in stability.

And Vista always owns XP at resource management... I upgraded from 98 to XP because 98 wouldn't handle the RAM I'd throw at it. Same here.

 

Can you some technical examples re 32 bit pls? You're not referring to 'super' fetch, I hope.

 

Not necessarily superfetch (which is valid, if you leave it running long enough and deal with the slowdowns for a while). But just the memory caching algorithms are much better in Vista than in XP. The whole "Vista is bloated! Look how much RAM it's using!" argument should actually be "Look how smart Vista is! It keeps things cached!". I dislike Vista for many reasons, but stability and resource management are definitely big improvements it has over XP.

 

agreed. XP is outdated. It's like comparing to windows 2000 to windows XP before Vista was out.
A lot of people said XP was bloated back then as well. LOL Now they're saying Vista is bloated. Those people will see every new OS bloated, maybe with the exception of Windows 7.

 

true. but I wonder how Apple seems to be able to keep their OSs smooth and yet not use much RAM?

 

Simple.
1- Mac OS is much much much smaller and lighter than Windows. It also has few system to support and all configured the same way, more or less. Windows has millions of system and possible configuration it needs to support, over 90% of the market means that the OS kernel must safe guard everything and analyse everything to prevent security problems. (That is why Microsoft restarted from scratch with Vista as XP did not cut is anymore, also explains why Vista was buggy at early release and had bugs that were fixed in XP and reappear in Vista.. of course SP1 fixed all that).

2- Mac OS priorities UI over processes. Microsoft and Linux way of thought is similar.. process first, then we will talk about UI. It's a different school of thought. Mac OS gives the illusion that everything is fast, rather than Linux/Windows give you real application performance, but gives you the illusion that things are not as fast as it appears.
Which one is best? well that is up to the user. It's just a different school of thought.

You can see this perfectly with Zune and iPod (HDD versions for fair comparison). The iPod takes more time to load your music and videos (especially large ones like 320kps 48KHz MP3 (that is above CD quality), and films on the device), but the UI is always smooth. The Zune, the UI sometimes is choppy, but it loads these large files faster. Again... school of thought.

 

A major port of the UI's "smoothness" is due to GPU acceleration. Not all vista machines has that kind of gpu power.

Also.. Vista runs "sluggish" is because it has to support wide variety of hardware, software and have to deal with tonnes of security issues. If you look at it this way, Vista is much, more secure than MacOS. "Mac/a.k.a PC with a different name" only has a very limited amount of hardware configuration and yet there's already several viruses that target MacOS. Compared to Vista with hundreds of thousands of possible configuration and a lot more user base, only a very small percentage of viruses have caused harm to Vista.
Anyways...back to the speed difference. If you take out the "compatibility" features of Vista.. e.g. remove all unnecessary services, drivers, softwares, settings, unnecesary patches, updates...etc. it'll be much faster than MacOS. Only then can you compare MacOS and Windows Vista fairly since they're both optimized for a specific computer.

 

Ah yes, forgot to mention this. In Vista, instead of doing what Mac OS does, they use the GPU (Aero) to render the UI. Now you must remember that the content of application is still rendered by what the application want to be rendered with. For example, games uses the GPU, applications uses the CPU.

This is how Microsoft now offer a smooth UI in Vista and Win7.

 

Do you believe Vista is unstable?

How much RAM do you believe OS X 10.5.6 takes at idle?

 

osx is bloated. compare it the old mac os.. it's really bloated

 

@Zero: Nope, I just remember the whole hub-ub when Vista launched that it was buggy like crazy, but I didn't use it so I was out of the know

Also, I believe OSX is still largely 32bit - that lead me to believe it required less, and so the designers decided to slow down the shift to 64...

Anyways, thanks for all the details, and no, I'm not a Mac fan whatsoever - never owned one actually, I was just curious. The real debate is still XP vs. Vista, and I suppose Vista makes good use of that RAM.

I'm certainly tilting towards Vista now, but if this laptop is used mostly for Premiere, After Effects, and Flash, which would it run faster with? I assume Vista has more tricks up its sleeve, but my intuition tells me that if I use XP, more of the RAM will be dedicated to the apps - but once again, I'm probably wrong. Please tell me why.

 

I do Flash, A LOT. The same system on my signature (not the Dell Latitude E6400, the one bellow it), had XP and now Vista 64-bit, with the same specs other than the video card. Despite having Vista which takes more RAM than XP, Flash was started up faster and compiled faster. No miracles here in speed here, but it was noticeable. Of course if you build a small project both ways it's virtually instant. But on large project, you do see the difference.

Again, Vista manages memory better, XP not. Xp was said to have an, and I quote from many sources "XP has an abysmal memory management". Because, not only it doesn't handle large amount of RAM (512MB or more) it puts everythin on the HDD as fast as it can. So it slows down the restoration of application once minimized, slows down many things because it uses the HDD a lot more, and well you don't use your RAM much. Also, it's REALLY hard to use 100% of your RAM in XP.. in teh sense that OS won't let you, because again, bad memory management . In Vista it's not the case.


Also, another note, Vista has Superfetch technology, which preloads your application before you do. Yes, it learns, so that applications starts faster. The space it "takes" is not permanent. It will release it as soon as an application needs it, no delay. So nothing to worry about. If you worry about Superfetch about security.. don't worry, it doesn't look at "Flash" and wtv program you run. It just looks at your memory program system files.. so even a super hacker comes to your system, all he would know is that you loaded "data.dll". Nothing more, no paths, no names (even that file name I said, I'll be surprised if he comes to that). So, useless, and nothing to be paranoiac about it.

 

Great, I'm all for Vista then.

Btw, I'm not just peeking into Flash, I was developing games for a while (know XGen?) until I took a break last year - so now I'm back AS3 here I come!

 

Yeah, I'm building a desktop computer, and I went with XP 32-bit. If I had gone 64-bit, it would have been Vista. But I'd rather wait for Win 7 if I were to pay that much, and I wanted a copy of XP anyways, so I figure I can upgrade to 64-bit Win 7 if it turns out good, and not have wasted $140 or something on Vista.

In other words, yep. Vista x64 is better.

 

Actually, I'm one of those lucky guys right now who can get any legal OP for free

 

You can get Vista almost everywhere for free (or at least really cheap) if you are student.

I mean you have:
- university/college store
- Microsoft Academic MSDNAA
- Microsoft Dreamspark (ok it's not Vista, but Server 2008 is close enough)

Also you can see companies, and Microsoft employee store, if you have any contacts or work there.

 

Wow, apparently, it's not anything unique! But I'm no student, I just have connections, that's cool though

 

While in the end I agree with you about going with Vista x64, XP Pro 64-bit was built off Server 2003 --- it's solid, but yeah, doesn't deliver what Vista does.

 

Microsoft states it won't support XP anymore and if you do want support you have to start paying for it. New hardwares and softwares are Vista friendly and XP drivers will soon be difficult to find. Windows 7 is coming out and XP will be further left behind. I know there are still a large group of businesses and individuals using XP but the future is coming.

 

From 2014, so no need to panic yet