Upgrade from XP to Vista, any value to it?

[woodmeister]

A general question I have is it worth upgrading a Fusion VM from XP

to Vista? Is there any value added?

[Uncle_Art]

"Upgrading" a VM to Vista comes with all of the cons of Upgrading a "Real" PC to Vista...and LACKS a few of the Benefits.

Vist is resource hungry, and wishes to be run on the latest, greatest, and fastest hardware you can throw at it. OK, so any Mac that can run Fusion, and therefore a Fusion Vista VM, is going to be pretty darn powerful... but you will be asking for MORE work from the same hardware. (Yes, you can "adjust" the VM's settings... but your Mac has the same stuff inside for Fusion to "base" the VM on.)

In a Virtual Environment, Vista isn't going to SEE the Mac's real hardware, either. It sees a "virtual" set of hardware that just might not run some of Vista's Eye-Candy. You may not get the "Ohhh...Ahhhh" experience that's supposed to convince you how "awesome" Vista is.

Although you have one superior advantage by having that Virtual Environment; you can just throw it out without "losing" all your stuff, if you create, and "experiment" on a second VM...

Like any other upgrade, don't do it "just because". If there's a feature you just gotta have, sure. A compatibility it'll give you that wasn't there... go for it. "Vista Only" application or device you need? Try it. But unless it's on a second machine, or one you just don't care about... an upgrade just for the sake of an upgrade, without a real concrete reason, other than "it's supposed to be 'better' "... is asking for trouble.

And, from my Paranoid Side... I always get sketchy about "Upgrades" to an OS. I just feel there's too much for an installer program to screw up on, while performing a nip-tuck of a running operating system. Given the choice, a Clean Install is, er, well, Cleaner.

Provided you have the disk space, or a worthy external drive, why not whip up a Vista VM and see if it's gonna be worth your time, effort, and sanity to migrate over?

And, of course, I would fails as a Mac Evangelist if I didn't at least ask... You have a Mac... you've SEEN OS X, right? And you're STILL considering buying Vista? If it's because you thing Vista's got something for you that OSX doesn't... play with OSX for a while.

Good Luck!

-art

[borisdusek]

Hi,

A general question I have is it worth upgrading a Fusion VM from XP

to Vista? Is there any value added?

my personal opinion is there is hardly any value added and some value removed. Vista is more memory-hungry, the default install is also more disk-hungry. That's a problem with a VM to which you don't want to assign lots of RAM and disk space that Mac OS X could use. Also Windows XP is the most supported OS on the planet - including being the most supported version of Windows.

Only value added in my opinion is better user interface in Vista (even though you don't get Aero in Fusion) - the nice improvements to the column view, address bar in Windows Explorer etc.

Also I would suggest you wait for Windows 7, upgrading to Vista at this point seems (with a little of crystal & rumor ball help) as a waste of money if you will be able to get Windows 7 in a few months (which is supposed to be less memory- and disk-hungry).

So it depends whether you see have some specific reason to run Vista in your particular case. If not, I would stick with XP.

[WoodyZ]

A general question I have is it worth upgrading a Fusion VM from XP

to Vista? Is there any value added?

Personally I have no need for Vista nor would I choose to use it over XP and more certainly not over OS X. Professionally I have to support it therefore I have to use it enough to know the in's and out's and have it available at the same time as other OSes I need to support. So this is where virtualization comes in nice. I will say that Vista runs better naively from Boot Camp on my MacBook Pro then any other Notebook I've run it on although that has more to do with the hardware specs. I ran it naively from Boot Camp just to check out the Eye Candy that Uncle Art mentioned and also ran the Boot Camp partition as a Virtual Machine however I now just run it a a normal file based Virtual Machine.

As to upgrading I never preform an in place upgrade and always Clean Build because the performance difference with clean building vs and in place upgrade produces a better build and just is not as problematic in the short run or down the road. Note that you can use the Upgrade DVD to preform a Clean Install and directions for this are out on the Internet.

How to install Windows Vista

How to Clean Install Windows Vista with Upgrade Media

[WoodyZ]

Also I would suggest you wait for Windows 7, upgrading to Vista at this point seems (with a little of crystal & rumor ball help) as a waste of money if you will be able to get Windows 7 in a few months (which is supposed to be less memory- and disk-hungry).

On a Physical Machine the Windows 7 Beta 1 runs better then Vista SP1 and overall is faster then Vista or XP and it should only be better in the final code. Also the Eye Candy in 7 is much nicer then what's in Vista however of course in a Virtual machine that a mute issue for now.

Anyway I totally agree that if one can wait I too highly recommend waiting.

[williambishop]

Oddly enough, we have hundreds of people who've upgraded from Vista to XP, so you may be looking at it the wrong way...In my opinion, and in many others, vista is more of a downgrade than anything.

[woodmeister]

Thank you all for taking the time to comment. From all I have read here,

I will stick with XP and only deal with Vista if I have some requirement

which forces me to make the move.

[williambishop]

Our stance as well...Unless there's a specific requirement, it's best avoided. All you get is slower.

W.