Is Vista Ultimate 64 w/SP1 okay for a development machine?

Question

I am updating my rig and I need to make a decision between staying with XP x64 or going to Vista x64. I do very little development, really just building products from my developers. The other 90% of my work is done with Google Apps, Skype, Office, etc...

I want to upgrade to Vista not only because I will have 3x monitors running on DirectX10, but mostly because iTunes isnt' supported on XP x64!

So, my question...

With all the horror stories about Vista, will Vista Ultimate x64 with 8GB RAM be good for my development machine?

If I can't develop on Vista, I can always fire open a VPC to do the development in. No?

EDIT

I am using all Microsoft development tools...

• VS.NET 2005
• VS.NET 2008
• VB6
• SQL Server 2005/2008
• ASP.NET
• (.NET 2.0 & .NET 3.0)

I'm sure the software will run, I suppose I am not so sure that the OS will be speedy enough, or stable enough.

Answer 1

I am fine with Vista 64 bits for .net and php.

A lot of conversation about it are already on SO. Here is some important point your might take in consideration for .Net:

• Unit Testing with NUnit

• UAC with developpement

• VS and Vista

• A lot more...

You can develop for X86 on your new X64 machine without problem.

For PHP XAMPP work fine, Eclipse work fine too.

Answer 2

I run Vista x64 with 4GB of memory and haven't run into any major problems. Before this I was using Vista x86 and I definitely like x64 better as it seems more stable.

In case you're curious, with only (hehe, only!? amazing to say) 4GB of memory I can easily run:

• 3 instances of Visual Studio 2008 with Resharper
• a couple Sql Management Studio instances
• Outlook with 3 mail stores totaling @ 2GB
• Firefox with @ 20 tabs
• a bunch of Windows Explorer windows
• Windows Media Player
• iTunes (which is slow as a dog)
• @ 5 Excel and Word documents
• plus some assorted services (eg, Sql Service 2005 and 2008) and status-area apps

Even with all this I still have roughly 750 MB free and no performance issues when using the applications.