Vista 64 Bit versions

[Jeremy Rasnic]

Any of them will be fine as long as they are 64 bit. I use Vista Ultimate 64. It has some perks to it like combining multiple drives into one. You may or may not need that. Look at the comparison chart between the different versions on Microsoft’s site to see what meets your needs. As for Vegas 8.1, you don’t need anything special in the way of an OS- just a 64 bit Windows platform.

j razz

[Steve Rhoden]

To get the most of your resources in going this route,
Vista ultimate 64 bit with Vegas 8.1 would fit the bill.

Steve Rhoden
Creative Director
TNX EFFECTS STUDIOS.
sample bits at
http://www.youtube.com/hentys

[Adam Rose esq.]

I would go with any version of 64, other than Basic. Ultimate doesn’t offer any better options than Business IMHO.

[John Rofrano]

Wow, we’re all over the board here because I’m going to recommend Vista Home Premium 64 and here’s why:

Basic is too basic it doesn’t have the media center or file sharing or the new Aero GUI or anything like that.

Business has limited multi-media capability (no media center, etc.) because it is meant for office use, not home entertainment.

Ultimate is, IMHO, a rip off because it’s almost twice as expensive as Premium and all it gives you hard drive encryption that doesn’t even work on 98% of computers (you need a special chip to take advantage of it) and it has some “unnamed” extras which turn out to be more themes and junk you don’t need. It also allows up to 128GB of memory.

For my money, Premium is the sweet spot at $99. It has everything Ultimate has except for the two unimportant items I mentioned above. The only “real” difference between Premium and Ultimate is that Premium maxes out at 16GB of memory instead of Ultimate’s 128GB. Since my motherboard maxes out at 8GB, Premium was the obvious choice for me.

I agree with Jeremy, look at the comparison chart on Microsoft’s web site and I think you will come to the same conclusion that I did.

For the record, I think it absolutely “stinks” that Vista32 and Vista64 aren’t delivered together at one price on the same install media. The fact that you can’t even upgrade from one to the other is mind boggling. Microsoft must really not want Vista 64 to succeed because they make it very painful to get it.

A word of caution: Make sure there are 64-bit drivers for all of your hardware. I cannot use my Vista 64 partition because there are no drivers for both my M-Audio FW-410 and Presonus FireStudio audio interfaces which means no audio for me. 🙁 A friend of mine has the same problem with their Alesis Multimix 8. Vista 64 is just not well supported at this time.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[John Frey]

Thanks to all of you for your input. All of my systems are dual boot with XP Pro and Vista. I have several copies of Home Preium on the way.

John D. Frey
25 Year owner/operator of two California-based production studios.

Digital West Video Productions of San Luis Obispo and Inland Images of Lake Elsinore