Hi,
One of hard drives failed and so i need to reinstall it all and was wondering if it’s time to go with Windows 7? any thoughts about that… Is XP 64bit still better in performance while using 3ds max + VRay?
I’m really enjoying windows 7 64bit. I don’t think you’ll regret going with it.
I’ve been running Windows 7 Beta for the past year on my Render Farm and it’s been very solid. I’m looking forward to upgrading everything to Windows 7 soon.
I too have been running Windows7 64bit for at least a year now and I haven’t looked back. I am very happy with the new enhancements to windows explorer! You will be pleasantly surprised. Plus it is the easiest OS install I have ever done.
Windows 7 64 bit is rock solid for me as well. Just about everything works without hassle . . . even things that were shaky in XP(blu-ray playback in my case). Highly recommended.
Any reason win7 64 home premium wouldn’t be fine for a render slave? Looking at a refurbished dbox and there’s no OS choice
Win7 was solid for me. Max is also crashing farrr less.
Very interesting…good to get this kind of feedback. I’ll probably make the change sometime this year..
Upgraded work computers from XP32bit too Win764bit earlier this year, haven’t ran into any troubles so far. Was quite pleased that my workstation Win764bit plays nicely with the WinXP64bit render farm nodes.
Windows 7 x64 is the best option at the moment. I have 12Gb of Ram and it’s using 12% of that at the with Sketchup open. Vista x64 is using 16% with the same amount of ram with nothing open. Vray DR, Backburner and RT work perfectly between 7 and Vista x64 here.
while I mostly like W7 I found a few things maddening:
you can’t arrange thumbnails arbitrarily, they are always sorted by name/date/type etc - so you cant drag them around in a folder
and I sorely missed the ‘up’ button in folders (breadcrumb is fine for some things but simple up is good too)
- I also couldn’t care less about the new program start thing
after lots of searching I found fixes for those so if anyone wants 'em I’ll dig up the links
the ‘seconds’ indicator when viewing file listings in detail view is gone too, which was useful when skimming 1000 vrmaps, but I learned to live without that
and I hate ‘windows live mail’ - even Vista had ‘windows mail’ which was identical to outlook express - so I use Thunderbird now which I dont like much either
Thanks for the feedback…
It’s strange but it is a first time i see 100% positive opinion about a Microsoft OS 
even though limited to our scope of 3D
I installed Windows 7 it is very nice and fast and many things work better.
So far so good, but i get more issues using VRayScatter and VRay RT then before on the XP system. 3ds Max crashes much more often when using these when previously it work fine for the same scenes being tested.
I’ll share more info as i go along setting the system up for full production.
Cheers.
good to hear, except on the crashing part. What video Card do you have? I ended up reverting back to older drivers. There was an old post were someone recommended the older nvidia drivers for the gtx series and it avoided a lot of crashed for me. Might want to consider that. =)