Out of curiosity, have any of you guys made the leap to a 64-bit operating system?

I'm planning on making the God-forsaken switch to Vista sometime next year so I can start working on my MCSE 2008 cert, and I think it might be a good time to transition to a native 64-bit operating system.

From what I've been reading, most manufacturers have finally released relatively stable 64-bit drivers, and Microsoft has correct the most egregious flaws with their 64-bit Vista implementation.

Briney, are any of your employer's toys running a 64-bit OS?

-b0b
(...wants to know if anyone has moved to the "dark side.")

I know you're running an oddball virtual install on a Macintrash, but have you run into any driver issues?  Have you noticed the infamous sound glitching that Vista is known for?

The first thing I'm going to do is disable the UAC "feature" in Vista.  That bugged the crap out of me in Vista RC2.

-b0b
(...foams at the mouth.)

Does UAC annoy the crap out of you, or is it just me?



-b0b
(...disabled it after the 4,316th warning.)

Why not disable it?

How many people do you let use your computer?

I don't let anyone, that's why I invested in a trunk monkey to protect it.

UAC is completely and utterly pointless in a properly-administrated Active Directory domain.  If the PC is a member workstation in an AD domain administrated by somebody with half a brain, there is absolutely no reason to leave UAC enabled.

On a typical standalone home PC run by Ma and Pa Retard, then yes, UAC might prevent some malicious behavior from third parties.  That being said, Microsoft should have learned long ago that annoying pop-up warnings will simply be ignored by the average user.  After seeing a warning message for the thousandth time, they'll just click OK without even reading the message.  Can you blame them?  If clicking OK was the right choice the first 999 times, why would it be wrong the 1,000th time?

UAC also has a habit of popping up at the most inconvenient times.  Have you tried to play a network game under Vista yet?  Whenever the game calls on a secondary application for connectivity (for voice chat, server hosting, Internet game searches, etc.), UAC pops up a warning.  Do you know how annoying it is to have an application pop up in the middle of your game to warn you about completely safe activity?  Depending on what you're playing, your game will either minimize, lock up temporarily, or just crash entirely.  Thanks, Microsoft!

-b0b
(...LAME!)

I'm pretty sure there is a Windows XP Pro 64 bit version.

Stick wrote on Nov 30^th, 2007 at 12:21pm:


There are two of them, actually.  The first was designed for i64 Itanium Itanic platforms and is no longer supported.  The newer version is for x64 (AMD/Intel) platforms.

From what I've heard, driver and application support for XP 64 is really scarce, even more so than Vista 64.  Moreover, there is no real reason for me to install a 64-bit OS if I stick with XP.

Depending on my finances in February when I build my new system, I might just stick with good ol' 32-bit XP for a couple months until I can afford my new drive array and a copy of Vista Ultimate 64.  That should give the platform a few more months to incubate before I make the plunge.

-b0b
(...can't wait until he can get his hands on a GeForce 9000 series card!)

Well, I installed the 32-bit version of Vista last night.  I popped the new 500GB hard drive and 550w PSU into my existing rig and removed the RAID adapter, four 80GB SATA drives, the 431w PSU, and four pounds of dust.

After fighting like crazy for two hours to get my old Via KT880 motherboard to recognize the new SATA3 hard drive, I eventually had to give up and move the drive to the onboard ALi SATA RAID ports.  These are slower than the other two ports because they use a secondary chip instead of the KT880 Southbridge, but the difference seems to be negligible.  The Via KT880 just won't recognize the SATA3 drive, even when I use a jumper to force the drive into SATA1.5 compatibility mode.

I installed Vista Ultimate 32-bit so I could get an idea of how it runs on my old system before upgrading in February.  For what its worth, Vista itself seems to run fairly well.  I haven't installed any applications or games yet so I can't really comment on the difference in performance, but so far everything seems to be running smoothly.

I haven't tried out Windows Aero, Flip 3D, or BitLocker yet, so I'll comment on those later.  I'm really curious to see how big of an impact Aero and Flip3D have on system performance.

I did have a chance to play with ReadyBoost, though, and I have to say that it's a really cool technology.  ReadyBoost uses cheap USB flash drives as a form of secondary RAM.  Since flash drives have much higher access speeds than hard drives, ReadyBoost can cache files into a USB flash drive once RAM is full.  This results in faster application responsiveness.

I've got a brand spankin' new 4GB SDHC card that came with a USB flash drive that I bought for the Wii and my DVD player.  Of course, after I bought it, I found out that neither system supports SDHC, only the older SD standard.  ReadyBoost, here we come!



I've got a slightly different model with an annoying flashing blue LED that is brighter than the sun, but this is a pretty close match.



Once you insert the drive, you can select the ReadyBoost tab in the drive properties to turn the feature on and select how much space on the drive you want to dedicate.  This screenshot is stolen from some random website, but I've dedicated the entire 4GB to ReadyBoost.  I'll run some benchmarks with and without ReadyBoost later on to see how much it really helps.

I do have a few complaints, though.  First, Vista seems to thrash my processor like crazy.  I realize that my Athlon XP 3000+ is nowhere near the fastest processor on the market these days, but there's really no reason why an operating system with no applications running should be using 100% of a 2.164GHz processor.  It doesn't seem to be killing my system performance, though, so I'll have to wait and see how it affects applications and games.

On the other hand, Vista doesn't seem to be nearly as big a memory hog as most people complain about.  Again, I'll see if this changes once I enable Aero and Flip 3D.

Disk Defragmenter has been completely overhauled, and I can see both pros and cons with the new program.  On one hand, scheduling automatic defrags is much easier and can be done within the program, instead of using Task Scheduler.  On the other hand, you can no longer pull up a report of fragmentation before or after the scan, and you have no visual indicator of the progress of an ongoing scan.  That really blows, because you've got no idea how much of a scan has been completed!

As I suspected, UAC is still extraordinarily annoying.  I disabled it almost immediately.  Every time you try to do anything, I had to confirm it with UAC.  Delete an item off the start menu?  UAC!  Change your display properties?  UAC!  Defragment your hard drive?  UAC!  Please, tell me why it's necessary to use UAC to confirm a defragmentation?  Is Microsoft worried that some violent hacker is going to maliciously defragment everybody's hard drives?

-b0b
(...will definitely post more as he thinks of it.)