I agree with Blair. It looks like a case of "penny wise - pound foolish".

I would go with Vista X64. Vista was designed to be a 64 bit OS, XP was made into a 64 bit OS. Autodesk recomends Vista 64 bit over XP 64.

I'm not sure why everyone hates Vista so much. It IS a better OS than XP. It may appear to be a little more resource intensive and that is partly true and partly by design. But you are going to be sticking over 4GB of ram into the machine so I am betting you won't see any performance problems.

So why in the world would I like Vista over XP when it seems like the rest of the free world would rather use Windows 3.1?

Security. There hasn't been a virus attack that a user didn't install yet.

Start menu app launching. Hit the start button and type the program you would like to open hit enter and poof there it is.

Instant search. Everything, or the areas you choose, are indexed. Looking for that file? Just type it in the start menu, or from within windows explorer. And yes, I know there are things that will do this in XP, but IMHO, they don't work as well as instant search.

Preview. For example, click on a Word, Excel, Powerpoint, PDF etc. in windows explorer and you can view a document without opening it. Handy when looking for someting that you aren't quite sure what you are looking for.

Reliabilty and Performance monitor. If your computer crashes you can open this monitor to research if there were any software installs or driver installs that may have made your system unstable.

Previewing of open programs from the task bar, or alt tab. You can see what is in the minimized program by putting your mouse over it, or if you alt tab you get a nice preview as well.

And I could go on. Nothing earth shattering, but there are a lot of little things that make it better than XP.

I'm not sure what about the interface is so dratically different from XP that would cause someone a problem. It's the same basic layout but it looks nicer. There was a lot of foundation laid in Vista and that foundation is now paying off in Windows 7.

And if you don't like the interface of Vista, I can't see how you are going to like the Windows 7 interface. There isn't a whole lot of difference. I like Windows 7 a lot. I'm using it as my primary OS now.

I just think it is funny that Vista is worst OS ever, and Windows 7 gets nothing but great reviews. You will not find that much difference between them, but there is improvements.

Kevin

A few weeks ago I bought a MacBook Pro with 8 Gb Ram, just to run Inventor. I first installed XP Pro 64 bit, but the lack of drivers made me change to Vista 64. All looks good, but I keep loosing my license of Inventor (the last week I had to contact Autodesk 5 times because my license was broken). Does anyone know of this problem?

Thx

Frank

Let me see if I can guess your setup. You are using Inventor 2009 or earlier and you have an external USB drive or Firewire drive connected that you disconnect when you move around with the laptop?

Am I right? If I am I believe there are only 2 things you can do. Upgrade to Inventor 2010, or quit disconnecting the USB/Firewire drive (yes I know this isn't very practical and defeats the purpose).

I had this same issue on my Macbook Pro and an Autodesk employee helped me and some others figure out the issue. It has been fixed with Inventor 2010.

Kevin

Hello Kevin,

My data is on the laptop, but indeed I do use an external USB drive to make backups. And indeed it could be the fact that every time I connect the external driver to my laptop, the license has disappeared. Is there a possibility to keep on using the external drive with IV 2009? My older projects are on that machine, and although I'm upgrading to IV2010 next friday, I still need 2009 for some of my customers.

Regards,

Frank

I have a desktop machine with XP64 and a laptop with Vista 32. The following items will work on my Vista laptop but not on my XP64 desktop:

- MDT import (works on Vista laptop):
I get an error message about something not being licensed

- IGS open (works on Vista laptop):
The program goes through its routine and the result is no part or composite listed

- Stress analysis:
After assigning fixed constraints and loads the program quickly crashes when clicking on the update button.

- Adding user parameter data then using this data in BOM & part lists.

- I have had a couple of content center items that while placing them in the design will list the part in the browser but there is no actual part generated.

Other than the above items it runs good on the XP64 machine. It is a pain having to go back and forth between computers to do certain things. So far no response on why this is happening. I purchased a seat of Vista 64 hoping it will fix these items.

Regarding other issues with XP 64, I have had some other software that won't run with it (ex: Acrobat 7.0, automatic back up software, had to upgrade a couple others).

I had to purchase a new HP office jet machine and the drivers for XP64 have a limited amount of features compared to the XP32 & Vista drivers.

I have to send drawings to my plotter using the Vista laptop, then through a XP32 bit computer, then to my plotter. I had to turn off the print spooler feature due to rendered/ colored drawings taking 2+ hours to dump to the plotter. With the spooler turned off it takes about 40 minutes. If I do it out of my XP64, then through the XP32, it locks up the computer until done. My Vista laptop release the computer after about 15 seconds. I am aware of aftermarket drivers for the plotter but this works for now.

Knowing this I would have just went right to Vista 64.

XP 64 desktop w/ 4 g ram, ATI 512mb video card