Lots of people bitch about Vista. They need to get over it. I would say in the audio industry (pc users not macoids) still use XP Pro but some of us use Vista Business or Ultimate too. Vista actually has some networking advantages (w/SP1 or SP2) over XP.

Because folks have an unreasonable amount of baggage (most sight unseen) with Vista most will await Windows 7 unless they have to upgrade their computers now.

All the major DAWs and most minor ones work just fine on Vista. I do recommend sticking with the Business or Ultimate versions however.

"Lots of people bitch about Vista. They need to get over it"

Lots of people bitched about XP...

It's all about the drivers. If you can find drivers that were made for your operating system then for sure go for it. Sometimes it works even if they weren't made for it. I personally think that people who complain about Vista haven't used it and are just parroting what they have heard. I work with a bunch of engineers even, and I have heard a million times "oh vista sucks." I ask what they don't like and they come up empty because they don't have it. I personally use Vista x64 (that's a double whammy) and am happy with it.

My main complaint w/ Vista is it can be a resource hog. I've streamlined my rig to the best of my knowledge, but w/ a duo-core and 3G RAM, it doesn't take long for my DAW to start stuttering during mixing (esp. w/ MBCs and reverbs).

Without getting into the reasons why, I have had problems with recording on Vista, but am sailing along smooth now with Vista + FP10 + Reaper

No problems at all here with Vista; I prefer "Clean Installs", for what it's worth. Upgrades from XP were all problematic, while clean installs are solid.

Networking with Vista is better too, and once you have a properly written driver (by the manufacturer of whatever piece of gear in question), you should be fine.

The ASIO Vista drivers for all the Mackie FW cards, for example, while arriving INSANTELY late in the game (2-3 months ago, I think?) are rock solid and work flawlessly, much much better than the old XP work-around.

In addition to turning off all the bloatware and resource hogs, make sure your permissions are properly set on your Hard Drives, esp new/external drives. Without "Allow All" properly set in the sharing setup, you can get enough trouble and crashes to make you insane. (The problem is that your applications won't be allowed to write/append/update files on drives that don't have the right permissions set up.)

Once that's taken care of, many problems simply go away and Vista should work very nicely for you.

As many others have said already, it's largely a myth (at least in my experience) that Vista is "BAD". Personally, I think it was just a huge avoidance of change by many, along with reluctance and lack of resources by vendors to get on the stick fast enough to create proper drivers to work with Vista and their gear/software.

Not everyone remembers the "Bad old days" of Windows 3.11 and Win95, where it was mandatory for any change/upgrade to get under the hood, find drivers the hard & old-fashioned way, and spend hours, days & weeks in downtime trying to figure out what IRQ and DMA conflicts were, let alone how to fix them.

These days, we really REALLY have it so much better, but people tend to be crybabies and spoiled brats when it comes to getting off their butts and cracking a manual or calling tech support. IMHO, Vista was/is a great OS, and it's too bad it took the beating it did. Hopefully, Windows 7 will be all that, and more.

Don't forget Win ME. Oi.

Every dog has it's day... to be awful.

I LIKE Vista.
I prefer the Win7 RC and hope to buy it once it's out properly. Maybe Christmas or something.

Vista rarely gave me problems except break my old audio app which hasn't been updated for years anyway.