Vista 64 on an overclocked Quad-core (Q6600) with 8GB of memory and a GTS8800 and a pair of RAID 1 arrays worked great. Performance was at least as good as my 1.6GHz Celeron running XP. Oh...apart from the driver issues...and the fact that I had to take out a video card because SLI was broken...and replace a scanner that didn't have certified drivers....and buy a new sound card because EAX wasn't supported for 4 months after release...and the occassional blue screen...and it took 5 times as long to copy files...and it occassionally trashes my Linux partitions by helping to format my "unformatted" drives...and my video encoders all broke....and a lot of my apps have to be run in a virtual XP machine....and I couldn't do an in-place upgrade from XP64.
Ok...so maybe it hasn't been so great. But I'm running Vista! I have a beautiful Aero interface to watch while my machine is busy preparing to digitally hang itself from a protruding stack overflow.
Vista works great for *some* people with very specific computing needs (mostly around using nothing but Office and maybe a game or three). But, the real issue is that the functional benefits really don't justify the 10-20% performance hit off the top and the compatibility headaches.
I've also gone back to XP64. But I still have high hopes for SP1 Final.
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