Recently, I was ‘forced’ to upgrade one of my development machines to Vista in order to start playing with the Windows Azure cloud tools due to the requirement of IIS 7. While I’m not sure how valuable publishing enterprise applications in the cloud are going to be, it is a good option for small to medium sized and/or and resource-(con)strained businesses.
So, with a bit of hesitation, I decided to wipe my machine and take the Vista plunge full on and installed Vista x64 SP1. I had some issues using the latest video driver provided by Dell that would not allow me to run the ‘Aero’ theme (by limiting my color depth to 16-bit instead of 32-bit), but once I rolled that back to an earlier version everything was running smoothly.
After a couple of weeks running Vista with all of my development tools and applications installed, I have to say that although there is a bit of a learning curve when you are very accustomed to XP, I haven’t run into any real issues yet. In fact, the machine is running faster than 32-bit XP and has actually been fun to use.
Caveat: My machine (a Dell Latitude D830) has an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU T7700 @ 2.4GHz, 4GB RAM, reasonably fast hard drive, and a middle-tier graphics card, so it is definitely Vista capable and scores a Windows Experience Index of 3.4 (limited by the graphics card; all other stats are 4.8+)
I cannot speak of the experience running Vista x32, but I do know that when Microsoft wrote the x64 versions of Windows they were able to eliminate a lot of the previous pain points simply because of the new architecture.
Based on my experiences so far, I wouldn’t mind moving some of my other (capable machines) over to Vista. However, I might just wait for Windows 7 to be released. I know a few people that are currently running it and have nothing but good things to say about it. Time will tell.
