I searched the forums for an hour or so looking to see if there was any usability differences to Vegas users on the various 64bit versions of Vista.

So far, I cannot tell if there is any functional differences between the Ultimate / Business / Home Premium versions sith specific use of Vegas 8 / 9 in mind.

One feature difference is the presence of Windows Movie Maker for Ultimate or Premium but not Business. But does that affect Vegas at all? Does Vegas come with all the WMV codecs needed or does it use the Windows Movie Maker codec?

Here is a comparison chart for reference. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista_editions#Comparison_chart)

What about BD-DVD playback? Premium lists support for HDTV, but is that just broadcast encrypted signals, or all HD video content? Corrently, Windows Media Player requires an extension (that you must buy) to play DVDs. Does one of the 64 version of Vista have this ability but another does not?

Also, Premium mentions support for Sideshow auxiliary displays, but that is different from additional displays (monitors), correct?

Thanks for any advice.

I would check the different versions and see how much RAM each can access. My 64-bit version is Home - Premium and seems to be working fine. That machine has 4Gig of RAM.

From what I was told -
Vista Business 64 is supposed to be the fastest of all the versions in the sense that it's not as resource hungry as the versions geared towards consumer/multimedia use.

Personally speaking -
I'm using Vista Ultimate 64 with 8GB of DDR2 and I have no complaints in regards to Vegas' performance on my system - [either 8.1 and 8.0c]

Good evening,

I use home premium on a quad I7 with 6 gigs of ram. It seeems to run just fine. seldom does it go higher than 50% useage of the Ram.

It does use a gig just for running windows.

I had to do some tweaking and leaning down of all the junk one does not need!!! this seemed to up the annie on how much the cpu was being used. now when I render hd it runs as high as 75% useage of the cpu s (it runs 8 strands of data). Prior to tweaking it seldom ran over 45%, so it appears that some of the background programs were preventing optimization.

that being the case maybe a leaner business vista would be easier out of the box.

Just some thoughts.