That's what I am nervous about. Windows 7 from all I have heard is much better than Vista. Unfortunately, I have Vista Ultimate 64. I shudder at the thought of upgrading operating systems on a computer. I always worry I will lose something.
It is also installed on my office PC, which is also on Vista Ultimate. On this pc I've only run it enough to know it works and to check all the settings were correct. For now, though, I need to stay on 2010 for compatibility reasons.
I've been using 2011 on a Vista Home Premium 64-bit, with 8GB of RAM on a really capable machine for a week or so now. It was going great with pretty nice performance until I tried to do some volume surfaces and it has been hanging up on me.
Before pursuing an OS upgrade you would want to be sure the problem you are having is being caused by the OS. Therefore you should exhaust all other possibilities first. Have you done any troubleshooting to eliminate the problem being specific to a file, hardware or configuration settings? Have you researched knowlegebase? Have you contacted Tech Support?
I can't recommend any tweaks that might improve performance. I have never had good results when using hardware acceleration for video as it tends to hang easily when using 3D orbit, but that is not likely to be causing your problems with surface volumes.
One tool I find very useful is a File Monitoring utility which reports file activity in real time. When you run into a process in ACAd that seems to be slow, a file monitoring utility will tell you what file the OS is hanging on, such as a missing font file or the Virus scanner scanning the files.
I am running Vista 64 Home premium and have a small issue. If I turn on SDI mode to 1 and save drawing in paperspace then come back into drawing. it crashes autocad while in civil 3d workspace. Doesn't happen on Win 7 64bit computers. I noticed that Civil 3D 2011 says it doesn't support Vista Home Premium 64bit and Autcad 2011 Civil 3D 64 bit.
The installer detects what operating system you are running. The 32 bit version will not install on a 64 bit operating system and the 64 bit version will not install on a 32 bit operating system. If you want Civil 3D 2011, you will be running the 64 bit version on your Vista machine. If you have any problems, it won't be because the machine is running Vista, since this is on the list of supported operating system. As a matter of fact, it's the number two suggested operating system for Civil 3D performance and stability.
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