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Looper's Delight
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> He said that Vista has gotten much better, and that all the > music apps he uses (and he uses a lot) run ok under Vista. He said Vista > would be a better choice than XP because it utilizes the dual processor much > more effectively than XP can. Sort of. My understanding is that XP Home supports only one "processor" (a chip that goes into a socket) but it does support more than one "core" within a processor. There aren't many multi-processor machines, most are dual or quad core. XP Pro supports both multi-processor and multi-core. There were some problems early on that required BIOS upgrades for AMD processors, and I think SP2 fixed a few problems. It is probably true that Vista was written to make better use of multi-cores for it's own internal operation but you won't notice this much when you're running a single audio application. It is more important that the audio application be written to take advantage of multiple cores. > Is any of our favorite tools still incompatible with Vista? Not that I'm aware of. Major software companies have to support Vista by now or they'd be out of business. I regularly use Bidule, Audio Mulch, and energyXT. Most VSTs don't have any issues because they operate within a very limited framework, it is host support for multi-cores that is more important. The main problem with Vista is that it is much more of a CPU hog than XP, especially if you enable all of the fancy "Aero" user interface features. So you need a modern machine with a good graphics card to run it and a CPU intensive audio application at the same time. Don't be afraid of Vista if you're getting a new multi-core machine with a graphics card that has at least 128MB of dedicated memory. But if you're trying to get the cheapest possible laptop or a small ultra-portable, they won't be very powerful and XP is usually a better choice. Jeff