I'm not concerned on the current state of driver availablity/compatibility and what-not. What I want to know is: at it's core, can Vista perform efficiently enough and stable enough to make a suitible DAW or will it be a no-go as an DAW OS forever?

To elaborate a bit: does SP1 clear up enough Vista problems to make it usable? If not, does the potential even exist for a future service pack to do the trick? Or will PC users seriously have to consider switching to OSX to utilize more than 3GB of RAM in a stable, well-supported, 64-bit DAW? Can Microsoft fix Vista?

I think we go through with this conversation with every version of Windows. Wait for a few service packs and try again. I'm sure Vista will be fine eventually once everything catches up.

Devon

Cris Randall of AudioDamage fame thinks Vista is just fine. Better than XP even if i understand correctly (could have been compared to OSX)
See the comments in this post

http://www.analogindustries.com/blog/entry.jsp?msg id=1206396597425&r=21#replies

So yeah there's hope. Plenty of people is running Vista and it's working fine for them.

A lot of the flac Vista has got is from misunderstandings like it uses as much RAM as it can for cache and people go OMFG!!!! it takes up all my RAM. I have nothing left. Not to mention all the DRM stuff people talked about before that does'nt seem to concern anyone anymore. At least not when it comes to DAW use.

...and the fact that Microsoft changed the driver structure for Vista at the last minute before launch, which meant all the audio drivers needed to be recoded or some such (I honestly don't remember the details). Once everyone has newer drivers for their audio card, the problem should hopefully pass on that piece of the problem.

Devon

Yeah,

Chris from AD was quite reassuring, and a few of my friends use Vista with no problems and no complaints whatsoever.

I am thinking about it but will porbably wait for a few months.

k

p.s.: one of my friends - a programmer by profession - says Vista is a lot cleaner system compared to XP, esp. as where to put what, no more \documents and settings\blahblah\blahblah\blahblah\applicationdat a ...

and (at last) no more MY documents, MY pictures ...

The thing is, with Microsoft's ongoing rep with new OSes and underpowered computers despite their constant marketing and pushing for the general public to upgrade to Vista, can be a nuisance to some.

I mean, my new laptop came with Vista Home Basic for one. Sure, it booted fine on factory load. (About as fast as my current XP installation with all the stuff installed.) Start installing stuff, boot time slows down, a lot. (1.73GHz Pentium Dual Core w/ 1GB DDR533 and 124GB SATA HDD) Took me 3 days to decide to kill the Vista installation and shove in Windows XP via Lenovo Downgrade recovery dvd.

It's understandable Vista will be the way of the future, but there really isn't a point to upgrading until you get a brand spanking new setup (whose motherboard architecture standard is completely new and incompatible with your older box except HDD, PSU, and DVD drive).

But the early push to forcing consumers to use Vista was a very bad move, to be honest. They should've held back a bit. (But then again, after all it's progress. )

You are not concerned on the current state of driver availablity/compatibility and want to talk about the possible use of an OS for musical purposes?

Ok, the driver question will improve and further SPs will make Vista an acceptable allrounder OS.
I am not so much into the technical side but afaik the main problem with Vista is that 'at it's core' it may be quite good but this core is embedded in tons of gimmicks, optical baubles and so on...

When you look at the spread of Vista amongst OSs and see that MS is already intensively working on Window7 it perhaps may never make it... I will stay at XP and see Window7 in 2 years. Perhaps this will become a bit more scalable and customizable

To this day, the standards of consumer-grade PC's have yet to reach the limits of what Windows XP can handle, with the exception of going beyond 8GB (was it?) of RAM. and core support for DirectX 10 applications (Thank Microsoft for not providing backward compatibility.) But that's about it really. Sure it was good reason before, in the confusion days of Windows 98 to Windows 2000/Me, where DOS support just 'died'. It made sense then (Win98 reached its limits), but how soon will XP become expendable?

i was reading a article that said vista was glitchy that was enouhg to keep me away

I'm very much concerned with drivers, I just know that my system is new enough that everything has a Vista driver, so it doesn't concern me for the sake of this argument.

What concerns me about Vista is I've heard lots of talk about DRM being a greater concern to Microsoft when developing Vista than performance, and it being almost twice as slow as XP when performing the same tasks. If that stuff is true then I'm not ready to hop aboard the good-ship Vista. If all that's entirely overblown, or those issues have been addressed, then the ability to use more RAM will certainly entice me into upgrading.

On the other hand, what if Vista is slower and at such a fundamental/architectural level that it can't be fixed. CNet has made statements that at least indicate to me that this could be true.

That's the conversation I want to have.

It already is a good OS for a DAW - I am using two Vista computers connected via FXTeleport and find the setup to be more than satisfactory. In fact, I am very happy with the stability and ease of use.

Ummm HDD and DVD might not work on a new motherboard if there are no EIDE and only SATa connectors, and newer motherboards might require EPS12v connections from the PSU, so those aren't even safe.

Devon

In general usage: Much better than XP and faster on this particular intel laptop hardware (HP NX7010), except for screen redraws because of XP-videodriver (thanks ati/amd for not supporting r9200M )

In audio usage on this particular hardware; little bit better latency on Asio4All.

Still I'm gonna use XP SP2(/SP3) on my forthcoming quadcore DAW.

Yeah, it takes time to collate the data from the millions of bug reports submitted or posted in sundry forums by customers who paid $$$ to be life-long beta-testers.

EDIT here is a hopefully helpful solution for some fellow KVR denisons:

http://johnbokma.com/mexit/2005/10/26/vmware-playe r-windows-xp.html

(started a topic with this link also...Cheers

I just had to check. I've never used that krap and hadn't even noticed it was gone.

All of which are easily bypassed. My Vista looks exactly the same as My XP installs, which look exactly the same as my Win2k installs which looked exactly the same as my Win98 installs, which looked rather similar to my Win95 installs. The only thing I miss is the Zune theme that I've started using on my XP laptop at work. It has nice, thin window borders which maximise space. I made the change from Aero because, for some dumb-arse reason, it doesn't pass themes down to child windows, so all my window borders inside ORION used the default scheme, which is unacceptably bright.

The only thing I've noticed is that it seems a little slower at copying files, especially when you are copying large numbers of them at once. It also took ages to calculate time remaining. SP1 has addressed those issues and seems to have done it well.

I've been running Vista 32 bit on my laptop for the last 6 months and I like it. Just installed SP1 and its got even better. I've done zero optimisation or anything - its the standard Dell install plus SP1 - and it works fine. Same latency as my XP workstation and roughly the same experience when using it. Early on I was ready to regress to XP if I wasn't happy but I am yet to have any kind of OS crash. it seems very good at isolating crashes to applications. Cool Edit 2000 crashes constantly, hence my recent upgrade to SoundForge 9.0, which is brilliantly stable. I think you are worrying about nothing.