I'm quite impressed with Windows Vista 64 bit ultimate edition

Another cool thing about running XP within Virtual PC of Vista 64 bit ultimate is that because I have a quad core, Vista dedicates one CPU to that virtual machine when XP is running in it, and looking at my CPU meter in Vista while running a compile in XP which takes 100% of the CPU only shows 25% total usage on my Vista CPU meter!  If I run a big task in Vista I can
see it starts to go over 25% up to 50 and more sometimes... That means the Vista OS is smart enough to delicate the whole virtual PC to one core, while letting the others work for the Vista OS demands.

The other cool thing is I can start the XP virtual pc session, open up a few instances of Visual Studio and run some apps in debug mode... then shut down the virtual PC and tell it to "save state"... I can then either turn off my computer (Vista shutdown) or just go back into the virtual PC... and walla! The XP is thawed out within 15 seconds and I am up and running my Visual
Studio sessions in debug mode within a fully booted XP OS!

Q: Does it solve the long compile times that you were having?

A: It partly solves it... the compile times are way faster, but the debugging has issues still under XP... under VS 2009 beta running under Vista, it is super fast and I can step debug... whereas in XP I sometimes have hangs in step debugging.... not sure if that is cause my virtual pc, or what... one issue in 2008 VS.NET I have is reading the registry from a ASP.NET web app - it fails... security rights most likely, and that is my only issue I could see under 2008... and the fact that if I convert my project files to that beta, I screw everyone else up that is using 2005... but it would be worth it if I could make sure I don't check in the project files into source safe... because converting my apps from 2005 to 2008 required ZERO code changes
(2003 to 2005 requires massive changes).

Another cool thing: I have two monitors now, 24" Samsung (under 500 bucks from buy.com as shown at www.compumagic.com/shop ) and at 19" Samsung 914v I got a few years ago at office depot... I have both hooked up to the new computer, and I have dual displays configured with my NVIDIA 8800 graphics processor (GPU)...... the NVIDIA is the top of the line today, but I got mine with 320MB ram, and not the 512 or 720 which run up to about 500 bucks... I can drag windows from my big monitor over to the right and they go onto the old 19 inch monitor... along with my mouse too... Its called extending the desktop.  So basically I have a monitor which is about 40 inches wide.  Now, I want to also access my old XP box Pentium 4 2.2 GHz machine I built about 4 years ago... because it has all my email and other stuff on it I need to use daily.  So I configured remote desktop.  Now I just remote desktop from vista 64 bit to XP bloatware filled machine and walla I have that placed onto my 19" monitor... remote desktop is 10 times faster than VNC and also it inherits your sound card, and so when sound plays on my old XP box, it gets routed through remote desktop, which is free with the Windows OS's, and is played through my new computer sound system.  I have the remote session in full screen so it looks just like I have the 19" monitor hooked up the the old pc... Now I can also grab a window from Vista and drag it over to the 19" monitor right on top of the remote session...  this is useful for debugging, when you have a program GUI you want to see while looking at the source code in visual studio... However I can't do that when running my Visual Studio sessions inside of Virtual PC (net yet at least).

Oh and it also plays youtube videos complete with full res and sound via remote desktop and the cpu meter on the vista machine stays down at 3 percent