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Thanks a lot for the link. Due to the warnings about modern hardware, I've started by getting a vmware image of HaikuOS. Do you know if BeOS installs on VMWare Workstation without trouble? Problems with large amount of RAM are easily controlled, but does BeOS support VMware or was that Haiku only? Again, thanks for your time.
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XP and Vista on the bare metal, XP64 and Vista64 in VMs (for testing purposes). There are additional VMs with other versions of Windows, but those are rarely used nowdays.
And yeah, it'd be cool to use a 64-bit OS for development, but driver support still isn't there.
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Shog9 wrote: but driver support still isn't there
For newish hardware it is, at least the only trouble I've had from Vista x64 has been finding a driver for my wireless card. Mind you it is a cheap and nasty aBit AirPace thingy-ma-bob. Everything else has had drivers for it more-or-less from the off, I did have a bit of problems initially with the onboard sound but that's been sorted a long time ago through a driver update.
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Ed.Poore wrote: For newish hardware it is
There's more than just hardware on the machine itself. I suspect Cisco has a Vista-friendly VPN system by now, but that's a huge upgrade and completely out of my control.
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Ah, never had to deal with Cisco routers etc so wouldn't know. 
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For windows development I've found Vista to be the best test and development operating system to date.
For development it's superior in no small part because of the prefetch feature which loads my tools incredibly fast. Prefetch is hand's down the most compelling reason to use Vista for a developer. Second of course is knowing how to code for it so you're not caught with your pants down when your customer can't use your software on Vista.
It's also rock solid stability wise (I've heard lot's of horror stories, but I made sure I got all Vista approved and high performance hardware when I bought it and I think a lot of problems can be traced back to 3rd party device drivers and inappropriate hardware). Not one crash or lock up to date which is important for me when developing and far more stable than XP or 2000 or 95 or 3.1 ever were.
For testing it's superior because Vista is the first OS to actually enforce all the guidelines for file and registry usage and security that have been in place for many years now, you have to write much more guideline conformant code on Vista and that flows down to xp and 2000 as well; the speed doesn't hurt when testing either.
We have test machines with windows 2003, 2000 and xp on them but strictly for performance and later stage pre-release testing and confirmation. I originally thought I would use VMWare to test on other os's on my Vista machine but it's just too fast for realistic performance testing so we keep a couple of old slugs on a rack when the time comes to see if anything needs tweaking. Also it helps to have a variety of hardware to catch anything out of the ordinary before beta release.
When everyone is a hero no one is a hero.
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I have to disagree on Vista. I was using WinXP SP2, which is still my favorite OS. My upgrade to Windows Vista Home Premium, which came with my new laptop, hasn't been positive on software side. I like some new features, but issues remain. For one, superfetching was slowing most of my resource-intensive apps down. The second a technician told me how to turn it off, my IDE's and games stopped lagging. Note: I had to set it to manual, so it never started up at all. Simply turning it off didn't work, as if it wouldn't dump the cache.
As for reliability, I've never had so many crashes. I stress my machines and software to the limit as a power user. My WinXP machine gave me the occasional hiccup or crash, but they were uncommon. And I could always kill rogue apps with task manager. On Vista, things stop working more often. Certain apps are able to bring down the whole system, and I've yet to find a way to close Shareaza when it freezes: no matter what the OS simply can't end process or restart system, but will continue working as if nothing is going on. Power down manually, go so safe mode, do safe shutdown, then restart as normal. I do this at least once a night when a program gets out of control, and Vista can't do anything except break. My XP machine, with the same programs, hardly ever broke down, with most stuff easy to fix.
I've tried many things with Vista for the year I've had it. I love the integrated search, my favorite feature, but incompatibility with most apps and $150 worth of "Vista-compatible" peripherals that won't work have made me decided to downgrade. Got a copy of WinXP Pro SP2, and getting system ready over next few weeks, backing things up. Oh yeah: backup feature sucks on vista. Backs up fine, then restore has occasionally not been able to find it, and wouldn't let me do manual find. I still recommend Acronis TrueImage, which I used over 10 times in one day on a development machine. Perfect. Yep, WinXP Pro, with extras like PowerTools and Launchy, is perfect. Vista: too many problems. My computer should work for me, not other way around. Many friends have same experience with Vista. They are awaiting my downgrade to see if problems go away. If they do, they will follow suite. We stay XP until forced to upgrade or Vista SP1 is better.
Oh yeah, security in Vista is a joke: researchers found ways around it pretty quick. Virus writers were among them. I got slammed, even with Max Vista Security, and best 3rd party suites... twice. Restored to factory condition. The only thing Vista security did was make me say yes an extra time to everything: it only stops the good guys, and the bad guys already know ways around. 
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To me the point of the security in Vista isn't at all to stop "bad guys" it's to stop users and lazy programmers from shooting themselves in the foot. As for the crashing and freezing it's pretty commonly accepted these days that Vista itself is not to blame with everyone but those that have an irrational need to complain about all things Microsoft.
Remember that we had all these same problems when XP was first released, this time around though it seems hardware manufacturers are not as willing to write new device drivers for Vista. Personally I think that a lot of hardware manufacturers are the ones that should be feeling the wrath of consumers, not microsoft. I think hardware people took Vista as an opportunity to be greedy and purposefully did not upgrade their drivers on their legacy hardware forcing users to buy new hardware. Microsoft can't force them to write new drivers but they should have some sort of method for indicating they won't work properly before people buy Vista, maybe they do, I didn't take a chance, I use this computer for work so I bought all new hardware that I personally researched in advance to make sure would work with Vista, all big name components from big name vendors and no problems of any kind.
As for new systems being sold as Vista compatible it's well known at this point that there are a lot of unscrupulous manufacturers and retailers who were making that claim without fully testing or checking it out and a lot of it is apparent right off the face of it to anyone who takes the time to do a little research before buying.
I guess Microsoft could have a program to step in and force retailers and manufacturers to not be allowed to use the Vista label or bundled Vista with hardware not properly tested and they probably should because it's only hurting Microsofts reputation despite it having nothing to do with them.
If I bought a new system that was certified as Vista ready and it crashed regularly I certainly wouldn't be bitching about it, I'd be returning it to the place I bought it and getting my money back very quickly.
When everyone is a hero no one is a hero.
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On Vista security, a major chunk of it was intended to stop "bad guys." Before and after the release date, Steve Ballmer made many claims about how Vista was more secure than any previous Windows, and would prevent many malicious attacks. Here is one of them, collected from vnunet.com: "Subject to the fact that there might still be a small amount of human error, we will have eliminated the known attack vectors that people use against us today." (Steve Ballmer, 2006, on Vista's security advantages) So, while some may help prevent people from shooting themselves in the foot, their marketing did focus on how Vista is more immune to malware. The claims were very misleading.
As for the drivers, I agree with you that the 3rd party groups are partially to blame. They aren't doing enough to prevent compatibility and reliability issues. However, if a company gets manufacturers to include a new product by default on computers they sell, removing an older stable product, one would hope they made sure the new product worked with most software. Microsoft always claimed they do testing across the board for compatibility, so how did they miss the bugs in so many major apps, then require Vista to be default anyway? Heck, most technicians I talk to can't even get many previous Microsoft products to work on anything but Ultimate, making them suspect a forced upgrade of software is in progress... especially to Office 2007, which works flawlessly.
I agree that Microsoft is not totally responsible, and I agree that their failure to deal with these troubles is hurting their image. You were right that the original XP had similar problems. I was aware of that, figuring that Vista had trouble just because it was new, which is why I didn't return laptop: others with different brands having same troubles, and I figured after a few months with patches, etc. problems would mostly go away. Got a little better, problems still severe. Maybe it is because I broke my rule about software: always wait for at least the second release to buy it, or else problems will be many. With windows, I always wait until SP1 minimum, SP2 preferrably. I used Win2kSP3 until WinXPSP2, and my migration was great. Will downgrade, but keep Vista on side for testing purposes: I will not make the mistake with my software that these other 3rd party publishers made... it will be compatible.
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