Quote - To the OP:

I found your post interesting. I have had Vista for about two months now and from day one I never had a problem with it. My system is very similar to yours yet my experience has been totally different. That's what is so odd about Vista. Some people have no problems, others live in Hell from the moment it is installed.

Poser runs great and very fast for me as do my other programs. I would never go back to XP.

So those that are considering Vista, I recommend it but remember I don't know which group you will fall into. :)

Well, Vista, Like most microsoft operating system releases in the past, is coded for the top 10% of hardware available.  They design the OS for the high end hardware, which is generally "mid range" hardware by the time the OS comes out, but the older hardware is often left out in the cold as a result.

The upside to a new OS from microsoft is generally device drivers and compatibility with a wider range of peripherals and add on hardware, the downside is that anything in your system that is "substandard" as far as the OS is concerned will cause the OS to get flaky, cause problems, or just plain crash.

It's been a pretty common problem with most new Microsoft OS releases, and the reason why I generally don't even consider upgrading to any new Microsoft OS for home use until at least the second service pack, to give them time to work out a lot of the bugs and get a lot of the stuff they missed prior to release fixed.

From what I've read believe it or not Vista does not seem to be as not as problem prone on the newer hardware as past releases of Windows have been.  Windows XP, which is now a nice, stable OS, was pretty buggy and problem prone when it was first released too - this is just something I've come to expect from Microsoft, I consider any of there first releases to be "wide area beta" and plan accordingly.

So while I might at some point consider switching to Vista, it probably won't happen any time soon, and with any luck it will become a moot point for me before it becomes necessary to upgrade.  I do about 80% of my work in Linux now anyway, the only reason I still have XP on the drive is for some of the higher end 3d apps I run at home that don't have a Linux equivalent.

And yes, for those who will inevitably jump all over that last statment as a chance to talk about blender, I'm well aware of Blender, but it has three major downfalls:

1. The interface is terrible, cryptic and difficult
2. It would require a ton of jumping through hoops to convert all of my current 3d projects to a workable format for blender
3. Did I mention the interface sucks?

But with a bit of luck and coding I hope to be able to come up with a total replacement for Poser that will run natively in Linux, in the meantime I'll probably keep my dual boot partition, Ubuntu / Windows XP 64.  But once I can replace those last few windows programs or Wine matures to the point where it can handle the 3d apps I use with minimum fuss, odds are good windows will disappear from my machine entirely.

Don't get me wrong, I don't hate windows - I'm not a "windows sucks" kinda guy or anything.  I just prefer Linux - it runs a lot more stable and with a lot less overhead, and the capabilities are simply remarkable.  The desktop distro's have come a long way in just the last few years, and Windows is become less and less necessary for me every day.  Just my experience mind you, your mileage may vary :)

-Never fear, RenderDog is near!  Oh wait, is that a chew toy?  Yup. ok, nevermind.. go back to fearing...