Random results with Vista over different hardware
During the UK release of Vista, i was working for a _very_ well known brand (X-Box competitor anyone?) as part of the internal support team, I was tasked with getting a dozen brand spanking new systems upgraded and ready for software engineers to transfer across to.
4 were top end quad-core systems boasting 4gig of ram each.
2 were AMD's top end dual core kits pushing 2gig of ram each
The rest were core2 Extreme's, with 2gig of ram each.
All ram was PC6400 and all disk drives were Raptors in raid 0.
The quad core machines were the bane of my life for long enough. They randomly fell over, were horridly slow at loading visual studio 2005 and the 'Long-goodbye' bug was such a pain, they were going to be left as a remote build farm before i was told to push XP on them. 2 hours later I was blessed with a beautifully running - and stable - development platform (naturally, they were passed on to people who earn far more money than I).
The two AMD's were great. Everything went on like a dream and although they did appear to take quite a performance hit when forced to compile a 4Gb binary executable, that’s what the distributed build software was for =)
The rest of the core2's were to fill out the rest of the engineers in one particular team, and even though everything went on fine, after a week of working with the, the engineers regretted asking for the upgrade, as general work flow was seriously disrupted but the stupidly slow network-copy bug. Strangely, this only happened one-way. From network to PC was fine. From PC to network storage ground to a halt almost every time, with the exception of one (just 1) PC which didn’t suffer from any of those problems but did blue-screen from time to time (usually during a big build!)
It seemed like different hardware would produce different problems, yet even identical hardware would cause random results in day-to-day running.
To date, all those systems have been given new hard drives with XP on, and all developers are running Vista in a virtual machine - Honestly the best way even though its somewhat slow.