I had upgraded my Windows XP system to Vista 32-bit a couple weeks ago but I have been having various problems with it since. My problems ranged from exceptions being thrown from both Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 at random times.
I was also unimpressed with the overall performance of Vista on my Intel Duo Core 2 Duo with 4G of RAM and a 10K RPM system drive. I think this system should be more than enough for Vista. I am not the only one reporting Vista slowness all over the blogosphere.
I did read that an in place upgrade from Windows XP to Vista may result in some performance issues so I thought long and hard if I wanted to completely re-install Vista. I decided to really bite the bullet and install Vista x64. The installation went very well and I was pretty happy with the performance and how IE and Firefox appeared to work.
The only real problem I had and turned out to be a show stopper was iTunes 7.5. Installing the software worked well thanks to a post by Brad Wilson and installing the 64-bit version of Gears, a driver used by iTunes. This driver made iTunes at least work and was able to load up all of my music and podcasts. The real issue was syncing my iPhone to iTunes, which failed when I plugged the iPhone in, getting an error I wish I had saved.
The error told me to uninstall iTunes and install the 64-bit version, which does not exist. Come on Apple, get your act together. It seems Apples vengeance against Microsoft is a bit old, like a child with a whining problem.
So, I am installing a clean install of Windows XP because I know it works. Once everyone has worked out their drivers with Vista I will revisit 64-bit.