Yeah it varies, those of us who buy gadgets may find they have issues. Printers may also needs some help, though when aren't printers an issue? ;)
Oh don't even get me started about printers :) When I was doing sysadmin work in Toronto the printers were the bane of my existence (particularly HP). And that was on regular old x86 XP. I can't imagine the horrors of trying to get an older/obscure one working properly with Vista x86 let alone x64.
It's just that see so many people with single core machines or first gen dual cores trying to run Vista and I shake my head. From personal experience you just don't need to. XP works fine. Vista x64 is for next gen PCs built with Vista in mind. Hardware who's date will be 2007+, not 2005. In fact if you don't have a DX10 graphics card (even the low 8 series for nvidia) then you probably do *not* need vista.
It's such a smooth pleasant experience using Vista with more than 2gb of ram on a new multi-core PC. It's fast, responsive and crap just works. With an older PC it's nothing but a headache and really - whats the point? Is XP not working or something? Stick with what works.
I agree. Although I did run Vista (x86) on my old AMD Athlon64 and it ran OK, not brilliant, but still quite usable. I think memory is a big thing. When I upgraded the athlon from 2 GB to 3 I noticed a nice increase in performance (not quite the jump I got from going dual core, but still).
That's something else. If you're going to use x64 anything, get lots of memory. Not because you need it, but because you can actually use it (anything above ~3.5 on x86 vista won't be addressed by the OS, and per process you only get 2 GB mapped unless you use some form of PAE and the app is large address aware, but that's good only up to 4GB)