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Oh you've made some good points about X64, but I kind of need it for my 3D animation/modeling. (12% speed difference with rendertimes with my PC).

I've not benchmarked Lightroom and Photoshop on 32 and 64 bit systems, but it should be a bit faster on the 64 bit side (bigger numbers etc.)
Seriously, RAM is only part of the reason I chose 64 bit (32 bit only allocated 3 GB's + graphics card)

About linux: yep, it's a specialist OS. But I think you should do just fine reading your 64 bit explanation.
I run it on a server, and my laptop. Where XP bogs down with an antivirus, CrunchBang Linux blows makes my laptop snappy as hell. That's quite an achievement considering the laptop orininally came with windows 98

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I take pictures so quickly, my highschool was "Continuous High".

Well, you kinda agree with what I said, don't ya? A 12% boost in 3D rendering speed isn't something which most folks would consider reasonable-enough for a shift to 64-bit or any other upgrade. But of course it's down to how much one truly benefits from it. As far as 3d is concerned, I did do some, and what I gathered is that for a developer, the "creating" process is the the one which consumes most of the time rather than the render times, which is usually tested on different levels of hardware, because the output is usually geared towards the masses - not the developer's PC. And I did mention that linux is the os for servers. As far as Linux is concerned, the greatest problem is hardware compatibility. 90% of DECENT sound cards (multi-channel, with EAX etc), TV tuners etc do not run on Linux. You don't buy a decent piece of hardware to test it - you buy it for optimal performance. So, even if some distros of linux manage to detect and use some HW, they are just not able to utilize them to the extent they are meant to be. There are some cool aspects of Vista, like file transfer speeds etc, but they are not enough for a full-time switch... for me at least. If you run a web server on your computer, and want to play, say COD5 or Crysis, would you prefer to boot to windows (which would stop your server) and keep the server offline for hours? When a server on windows is hacked, the hacker is usually a script kiddie. This usually can be tackled by most folks. But when your uber linux is hacked into, it takes more than one CCNA or RHCE dude to handle that. Nobody wants to invite a hacker. I'm not expert enough to handle that. That is why most websites prefer to display a 404 EVEN if the stuff is there, in some cases. Looking unimportant is one of the strategies to avoid inviting an attack. So I don't prefer to run an OS for running servers, creating/testing DX games/music/3D, watching/encoding h.264 movies etc etc (provided all such things were compatible with sweet linux). But that's just me....

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SX10IS
Flickr Picasa

And that's your freedom too

But...a 12% rendering speed increase was godsent when I needed to finish a 20 hour animation for the next day

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I take pictures so quickly, my highschool was "Continuous High".

Hi guys,

I'm not sure that a discussion about the relative performance of XP vs. Vista is actually on-topic in this thread which is, after all, about providing an XP virtual machine inside the Windows 7 environment as a standard feature of the top three versions of Windows 7. Shouldn't the discussion be about whether virtualising XP inside Windows 7 will be useful? One thing for sure is that users of Windows 7 won't be running games, or anything else that's graphically intensive, inside an XP VM. Suggesting that XP users don't upgrade to Windows 7 because their games will run faster in XP is certainly off-topic, regardless of the merits of the argument.

Bob.

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OM-D E-M5 + ED 12-50mm, H-PS14042E, H-F007014E, L-RS014150E, M.ZUIKO DIGITAL 45mm 1:1.8.
Gitzo GT1541T, Arca-Swiss Z1 DP ball-head.
Astrophotography: TEC 140 'scope, FLI ML16803 camera, ASA DDM60 Pro mount.

Yep, thanks Bob, I was about to step in too!

This thread is about the new XP mode under WIndows 7 and what people think of it.

MS included it to help business who need to run older XP programs.

Now that's fine, but I'm not sure there's tons of businesses running XP who are clamouring to upgrade.

I believe that the reason businesses didn't upgrade to Vista last time wasn't because it wasn't compatible with their XP programs, but simply because their existing XP systems were good enough. Why upgrade?

So I'm not sure which businesses would upgrade from a native XP system, to one which runs it under emulation - surely it's spending a lot of money in what could be a step backwards in performance and overall expereince compared to what they already have... or at best something that's as good. So why bother? What's WIndows 7 got that will tempt them to make the switch?

Remember we're talking businesses here running conservative office apps and some custom stuff - not gamers, or those into home entertainment or multimedia.

Where I work, regular desktops and laptops are all running XP. Our IT dept seem to have trouble keeping those running smoothly as it is. In my opinion due to the massive loads of corporate management bloat they stick on as policy. I'm sure most of it doesn't like each other. If they had to do vista as well they'll implode.

The shocker might be that IE6 is the only allowed browser. Anything else gets forcibly uninstalled automatically. Seems many people were installing firefox, which doesn't work with many of the web apps used resulting in support headache for them. Even IE7 isn't supported! If this is still the case, then XP mode with IE6 will overcome that hurdle.

Will Win7 be enough for them to make the switch? I'm not expecting it in a hurry, but it seems more likely than Vista. If nothing else, MS must be looking at pulling the plug on (native) XP all the time...

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Canon DSLRs: 7D, 5D2, 1D, 600D, 450D full spectrum, 300D IR mod
Lenses: EF 35/2, 50/1.8, 85/1.8, 135/2+SF, 28-80 V, 70-300L, 100-400L, TS-E 24/3.5L, MP-E 65, EF-S 15-85 IS
3rd party: Zeiss 2/50 makro, Samyang 8mm fisheye, Sigma 150 macro, 120-300 f/2.8 OS, Celestron 1325/13
Tinies: Sony HX9V.

Sorry for the offtopic-ness Gordon & Bob

I agree to your take on the upgrade notion. Many businesses I've been still run windows 2000, or have just recently switched to XP. I can't see the point in running business vista. Sysadmins are familiar with locking down XP, and vista does not provide much functionality over XP business-wise. The only things I can think of are Bitlocker (drive encryption, can also be achieved by the free and superior Truecrypt) and Steadystate (disk cloning and restoring every reboot to ensure a clean system).

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I take pictures so quickly, my highschool was "Continuous High".