Creative Suite performance in Vista vs XP according to Adobe

Question

Hi. I have been an Adobe user for some years now (Premiere Pro, After Effects etc.) and was looking for information on the site for the Creative Suite 3.3 and was amazed to read the following in the features section:
Support for the latest Mac and Windows systems
Experience the ultimate in performance by running Master Collection natively on Intel® based Macs and computers running Microsoft® Windows Vista®. Work smoothly on legacy PowerPC® based Macs and Windows® XP systems, as well.
I do not doubt that we can experience better performance running in Intel Macs vs legacy PowerPC Macs, since every new Mac OS has proven to be better than the previous, but according to this, we can experience Ultimate Performance in Vista and just smoothly performance in XP, stating that will run better in Vista than in XP???????
Anyone has experience if this statement is true? I am very interested in the product but would like to know where will it run better, if in XP or in Vista. Thanks in advanced.

Answer 1

No, you are obviously going to have more paging operations if you have less physical memory. Vista 32-bit is limited to a little more than 3 gigabytes of physical memory (the remainder of the 4 gigabyte physical memory space is reserved for video memory, BIOS, and memory-mapped I/O). Vista 64-bit will obviously allow more physical memory and hence less paging operations assuming the same application(s) are being run simultaneously. However, 32 bit applications running in Vista 64-bit cannot access more than the 3 gigabytes of memory in its 32-bit address space.
You mentioned "RAM errors" - that's definitely hardware-related. Likewise, a full system freeze could be hardware-related or possibly driver-related. Long periods of "not responding" followed by a process crashing can be due to an application program error, a problem with a driver, a firewall issue, a virus program problem, or more remotely, a hardware issue. We obviously cannot diagnose the problem remotely without much more information.
What I can tell you is that there is no known general problem of CS3 applications repeatedly "not responding" and then crashing under Vista 32-bit (or Vista 64-bit). Some combination of hardware problems, drivers, and/or other system configuration issues are likely to be the source of your problems.
- Dov