I have 64 bit Vista with 16 gigs of ram.
I love the 64 bit. Hate Vista.
Everything on it is difficult and requires you to hunt through the internet to find solutions for the million problems it has.
Unfortunately for me...Adobe Photoshop CS4 is designed to go 64 bit only with Vista so in order to use it to it's full potential I had to go to Vista.
I actually like Vista as far as being an operating system. But it's networking is a nightmare
I have a gigabyte ethernet card. Thing was setup to do "auto" (as it should be) in the speed in the configuration of the card (which they also changed how to get to that so it requires you to hunt it down whereas in all previous versions of windows it was a couple of clicks to see your properties for your connection)
Anyway, I kept getting kicked offline at random intervals. Just suddenly would have the limited connection. And then when I would try to "repair" it to get a new ip...the computer would NOT do it. And then it won't reboot! You have to hard boot it down.
And microsoft has NO help for you. Far as I could tell they don't even mention it. So I had to search google...where I found thousands of folks dealing with the same problem.
To stop it you have to go into the configuration and choose 10 mb half speed for you card. Fucking crazy.
Then I bought my oldest daughter a new computer a couple of weeks ago. Since it's in her room we ran it wireless. Welcome to the next Vista nightmare.
Kept knocking her offline every few minutes!
Had to do a big search on that as well, since Microsoft has nothing up about it.
Vista has IPv4 that we have all used since day one AND IPv6 which is the future. But for some reason there setup causes a conflict. So you have to disable the IPv6 to get wireless networking to work reliably.
No mention of that from Microsoft. Had to find that on a techie blog after searching high and low.
I won't even waste your time with the problems it has in changing peoples monitor profiles and fucking up graphics. Needless to say I wasted a lot of frustrating time hunting that one down on the internet and finding a solution.
But if you're gonna go 64 bit it does kick ass to do so. And once you've wasted a good amount of time researching and finding all the fixes the operating system is pretty stable.
From what I've read, Vista will soon be relegated to the trash heap in much the same way that Millenium was.
Microsoft is supposedly working hard to release Windows 7 to replace it.