@Dave – probably they’re doing it because it’s true. I have a physical Vista Ultimate x86 box underneath my desk alongside my XP machine, and my most recent laptop came with Vista Business, which I eventually downgraded to XP Pro. There’s no doubt about driver issues – my HP printer doesn’t work right with Vista (spooler crashes), and my trusty scanner (about 2 years old, an old USB Mustek model) doesn’t have drivers for Vista. Also, the Vista UI sucks – it’s the Windows Explorer UI I have the biggest problem with, that along with the way the Control Panel got deoptimized for expert users.

It was probably a valid issue at release, but I think you’d be hard pressed to find much recent hardware that doesn’t have signed drivers at this stage. MS won’t sign a vendor’s 32 bit driver without a matching 64 bit driver.

All the drivers for my ~2 year old hardware had signed Vista x64 drivers available about 9 months ago when I installed x86 on this machine.

For that matter, aren’t XP x64 drivers more of a pain to deal with than Vista x64?

Maybe I’m just very lucky with my Vista installs here, and shouldn’t jinx myself…

Well, I’m happy to hear if things have gotten better. I just keep hearing about random programs or driver issues. I mentioned Hanselman’s VMware thing, other random codec and video driver issues (see the comments here: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheCodingHorrorUltimateDeveloperRigThrowdownPart3.aspx) I also heard about Powerpoint issus (?!?!): http://blog.davidyack.com/journal/2008/2/5/the-return-of-vista-32bit.html

So you’re having no problems with driver signing? Not having to hunt around for 64 bit drivers? Not having programs that won’t install or run?

I’ve got no complaints on Vista, just haven’t had the guts (or hardware) to try 64 bit. I think Vista’s way better than XP.

I’m running Hyper-v on a modest 64bit laptop, it’s significantly faster that MS VPC. For example I can run 3 VMs running at native speed, but I do have separate hard drives – my laptop looks like an inverted PC with all the wires and drives hanging out.

For the past year my development has been in VMs, I typically have a Domain Controller, SharePoint Server, and Commerce Server running on separate VMs in an effort to simulate the production environment.

For me, the biggest drawbacks to working on VMs is non standard screen resolutions, I like to remote into my VMs when I can, but when using a VPN I can’t, so I end up working in a VM with a smaller or larger screen size.

On a big screen everything is ok, on a laptop things become painful. I’d like to maximize my screen real estate. Any tips on VPN / VMs and screen resolutions?

Like Dave I’m also running 64bit Vista on my primary dev machine, I did have some issues with video drivers, but once they were updated things have been relatively painless – well… except for weird issue with the keyboard and clipboard. I’m pretty impartial to Vista, I just wanted a 64bit OS, and I think I may install Server 2008 on my desktop for the hyper-v VM performance gains. I’m also toying with the idea of running Linux to make use of KVM.