Sunday, February 11, 2007

Vista 32 bit or 64?

Last week I took the plunge and installed Vista on my 4x4 machine.

I purchased a copy of the "limited edition signed by Bill Gates" version of Vista. Lame I know, but it was the same price as the regular version on Amazon.

The ultimate edition comes with two DVD's, one for the 32 bit version and one for the 64 bit version. So of course the first question that comes to mind, which version do I install?

Being a glutton for punishment as well as having some very solid reasons for wanting to use the 64 bit version, I chose to go for the 64 bit.

Here are a few reasons for choosing the 64 bit version: Microsoft has said that they will not allow Kernel level access to outside applications in vista 64. What this means is that malicious programs will have an extremely hard time placing system level "hooks" that could be used for nefarious purposes. This was a major issue in the months leading up to the release in 2006. Many anti-virus vendors were complaining that they would not be able to make their software work properly with vista if it did not allow Kernel level access. Microsoft acquiesced to their request due to political and legal pressure, especially the EU. The compromise was that the 32 bit version would be left "open" and the 64-bit version would be left closed. As a developer I feel that the general direction of pc software will be towards 64 bit - so I'm interested developing under a 64 bit environment. Finally, in reading the list of "known issues" listed by Nvidia for the 8800 it seemed that there were less known issues with the 64 bit version of the 8800 package versus the 32 bit version. Whether this is due to less testing of the 64 bit version, I don't know ^ ^.

It all seems to work however, and overall my impression is a positive one!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Logan- i have my amd fx 70 with 4gb ram up and running- unfort. i got the vista ultimate 32 bit oem version and it does not include 64 bit option. so i am not able to use my 4gb ram :( i was told the drivers were not mature enough on 64. I wonder if i can upgrade from vista 32 to 64 easily?

running sweet otherwise got 5.9 on all scores except my graphics holds me back at 5.3.

thanks for your thoughts

Anonymous said...

You can get up to 3GB to work with some apps if you boot with the /3GB option. You might also look into the PAE option. The OS should be able to access the 4GB, even though one app might have trouble getting more than 2GB. You'll have a lot of disk cache.

Anonymous said...

thanks the PAE option is most interesting after reading about it- are there downsides to this? also why would one prefer the /3gb option?