st: choosing Vista versus XP for Stata MP/SE on a 64-bit machine

[James Muller <james.s.muller@gmail.com>]

Hi all,

Recently a few people have come to me asking for advice on whether to 
choose Vista or XP as the operating system on workstations for 
relatively heavy numerical work using Stata. All 64-bit, assume a single 
dual-core or quad-core CPU.

One of these conversations involved some correspondence with Stata Corp 
(not by me personally), where the Stata guys were advocating Vista over 
XP rather avidly. I don't have any more information as to why they had 
this position.

Now to the point. I'm interested in getting people's views on Vista 
versus XP for a workstation primarily used for medium-size data work 
(requiring data between, say 2GB and 6GB to be held in RAM) on Stata 
MP/SE 64-bit.

It's worth noting that Microsoft have stated they will be supporting XP 
until 2014, so this is not an issue of XP becoming depreciated, just, 
possibly, outdated. That is to suggest, Vista may in fact be or become 
better than XP as a system for numerical work.

Take it as given that physical RAM can be upped to satisfy Vista's 
requirements (rule of thumb, Vista uses 1GB more RAM than XP to run). 
The only issues are stability and performance.

As a starting point, I get a little chatter about XP 64-bit having 
general memory management problems that do bad things to Stata's 
performance on big jobs. Gripes are generally on the topic of sloppy 
garbage collection (deallocation of memory) when a Stata instance maxes 
out physical RAM and swaps to virtual memory.

So, over to y'all. Comments, thoughts, musings or experience. Standard 
thanks in advance for anything you have to say.

Cheers,

James
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