Is Vista Ultimate 64 w/SP1 okay for a development machine?

Question

I am updating my rig and I need to make a decision between staying with XP x64 or going to Vista x64. I do very little development, really just building products from my developers. The other 90% of my work is done with Google Apps, Skype, Office, etc...

I want to upgrade to Vista not only because I will have 3x monitors running on DirectX10, but mostly because iTunes isnt' supported on XP x64!

So, my question...

With all the horror stories about Vista, will Vista Ultimate x64 with 8GB RAM be good for my development machine?

If I can't develop on Vista, I can always fire open a VPC to do the development in. No?

EDIT

I am using all Microsoft development tools...

• VS.NET 2005
• VS.NET 2008
• VB6
• SQL Server 2005/2008
• ASP.NET
• (.NET 2.0 & .NET 3.0)

I'm sure the software will run, I suppose I am not so sure that the OS will be speedy enough, or stable enough.

Ari

Vista is a fine OS. Horror stories are always from people who do not understand how it works... – Lani

You are developping what? Linux Kernel? It might be a problem... .Net? You are ok... Your question need to be clearer. – Lani

What development tools do you use? How big are the products you're building? We need some more details. – Abomination

To get iTunes to work on XP64 you can try this: yukichigai.googlepages.com/iphonex64 I've not tried it myself, but if it works it may save you an upgrade (: – Courtland

Answer 1

I am fine with Vista 64 bits for .net and php.

A lot of conversation about it are already on SO. Here is some important point your might take in consideration for .Net:

• Unit Testing with NUnit

• UAC with developpement

• VS and Vista

• A lot more...

You can develop for X86 on your new X64 machine without problem.

For PHP XAMPP work fine, Eclipse work fine too.

Ataghan

Answer 2

I run Vista x64 with 4GB of memory and haven't run into any major problems. Before this I was using Vista x86 and I definitely like x64 better as it seems more stable.

In case you're curious, with only (hehe, only!? amazing to say) 4GB of memory I can easily run:

• 3 instances of Visual Studio 2008 with Resharper
• a couple Sql Management Studio instances
• Outlook with 3 mail stores totaling @ 2GB
• Firefox with @ 20 tabs
• a bunch of Windows Explorer windows
• Windows Media Player
• iTunes (which is slow as a dog)
• @ 5 Excel and Word documents
• plus some assorted services (eg, Sql Service 2005 and 2008) and status-area apps

Even with all this I still have roughly 750 MB free and no performance issues when using the applications.

Quarry

Answer 3

I used it for a long time before switching to Windows Server 2008 (x64) - was very good though,

Personally, I found Server 2008 to be a much better dev OS though. Check out this article on converting Windows Server 2008 to smell a little more like Vista.

Courtland

I was thinking of this, but my requirement for iTunes may be a problem. ;) Do you use that? – Ari

BTW... I would rather use 2008 Server because of the software raid mirroring support. – Ari

iTunes works like a charm - so does the built-in RAID which is one of the main reasons I moved over. – Courtland

Does Win2008 use the new interface, and utilize DirectX 10? – Ari

It can do both, yeah. If you check the link in this answer out, it'll guide you through the installation process (it's there, just not installed by default) – Courtland

Answer 4

I run Vista Business x64 SP 1 (8 GB RAM) for one month now. No problems so far. I'm using following software:

• Visual Studio 2005 SP 1
• Visual Studio 2008 SP 1
• TortoiseSVN / VisualSVN
• Visual SourceSafe (older projects)
• SQL Server Client Tools
• Firefox 3.01 + Firebug
• IE 7 + Fiddler
• Chrome
• Red Gate SQL Compare / Data Compare
• Virtual PC 2007 SP 1
• Notepad ++
• SyncBack
• RoyalTS (RemoteDesktop Manager)
• Skype
• Office 2007

Dactylology

Answer 5

I personally use Vista Ultimate x64 with 8GB RAM for my development machine. I don't quite have 3 monitors, but my machine is pretty well set up for development.

Wise

What is don't "quite" have three monitors? :) – Straightout

Answer 6

I run Vista x64 Ultimate as my primary dev machine and it's just fine. Support for x64 has come a long way and for the most part you won't notice a difference except for program files location and much, much more RAM.

Misread

Answer 7

Vista x64 is great for .NET and Java. Started with 4GB RAM and that wasn't enough (hit 100% sometimes and the machine would slow to a crawl). 6GB is just barely enough. Hitting 95% memory usage sometimes and it slows down a little, but the machine doesn't go into a paging frenzy anymore.

Tameka

Wow, see this is what I worry about. I can get 16GB of RAM, maybe I'll do that. ;) – Ari

What are you doing that uses so much memory? – Straightout

Typically I have Spark (IM), Adobe Reader, VS2008, Netbeans 6.1, SQL Mgmt Studio, iTunes, Chrome, IE, Outlook 2007, Excel 2007, and a Solaris VM (1GB) open. – Tameka

Answer 8

Vista will be plenty fast and stable. I'm using Vista x64 Ultimate for development @work right now, and have been for some time. I have nothing but good to say about it.

Gar

Answer 9

I'd say it depends on what you're developing. The first priority should be to make sure that all of your development and testing tools work properly under Vista x64. If they don't, there's no reason to suffer the pain of doing all your actual work in a virtual machine.

So I'd say the best thing to do is to take the plunge, see how it works, and keep the XP discs around. And should everything work as expected, it would still be prudent to have a copy of XP running in a VPC just for compatibility testing.

Winnick

Are you really suggesting that he upgrade his production machine to Vista x64 to 'see how it works'? – Abomination

If it's a fresh install, then should it really matter? "Upgrading" any type of production machine will result in heartbreak; the only really trustworthy way to set up a serious box is with a clean install anyways. Or better yet, use partitions with multiple installations. – Winnick

Answer 10

You will have to go XP-based Virtual Machine for any development in IE6. It is near-impossible to run that browser in Vista, let alone Ultimate.

Since a lot of government and legacy code base is against IE6, this happens a lot.

Allurement

Answer 11

I've used Vista x64 as a development machine and have had only a few minor issues mostly related to using third party APIs in Visual Studio 2008. Just remember that if your getting a really unexplainable error within your Visual Studio project while utilizing a third party API - try compiling your app using the x86 CPU flag in your project settings. This has solved a few headaches for me here and there.

Wellhead