Hi there,

I currently run PPro CS 3.1.1 on WinXP Pro SP2. I find PPro perfectly stable for small projects but it can get really quite unstable with large, complex projects with nested timelines so I'm looking at my options. One option is, of course, to move to Windows Vista.

I have read quite a number of forum posts saying that PPro CS3 is actually more stable on Windows Vista than it is on XP Pro. I have a hunch that Adobe do the majority of their QA on Vista.

Has anyone recently swapped from XP to Vista (or visa-versa)? Have you found PPro to be more or less stable on Vista?

Many thanks,
Jack

Jack... I think you're going to get more opinions and anecdotes from us than facts on this question since quantifiable data is a bit thin on the ground.

That said, my experience of running both on XP and Vista leads me to believe that they are both reasonably stable. I recently finished a project in HDV that included nearly five hours of raw footage and the finished product is one hour with a lot of color correction and some effects, and Vista worked OK.

There have been many who have stayed away from Vista like the plague. Check the Adobe forums for some vociferous anti-Vista sentiment. I'm sure they all have valid reasons.

I think you could go either way and be successful.

Vista has matured quite a bit over the year and a half. If you've got a recent multicore computer and 2 GB RAM or more, definitely go for Vista. It has better memory management than XP - it takes up more RAM, but uses it more "wisely". It doesn't choke on multitasking as much as XP.

With computer older than 2 years, stick with XP.

I just went from a desktop with XP to a laptop with Vista home premium (32bit). So far very stable and no problems what so ever. Although I did go from a 2.5 p4 processor to a 2.5 duo.

I'm running a HP dv9700t, 4gb Ram, NAVIDIA GeForce 8600 with a T9300 Duo processor. Not having any issues even with large projects of two hours length. Render is faster and I'm smoking through AE as well.

Bridge shows an error on start up but works without faults.

Runnning quite a few different plug-ins like Pro Animator and some trapcode stuff and its much faster, I'm sure hardware is a part of that but I'm not having any problems with Vista.