I'm going to buy Vista but I thinking of getting the 64bit version. I was just wondering about any compatibility issues anyone has had with it and if you think it's wise to even go with the 64bit version at all?

Any advice is appreciated!

Depends on what software you're going to want to run on it.
I've been using Vista 64 bit for almost a year now without any major issues.

You do want to check that the software/hardware you want to use it with a 64 bit compatible however. Vista has better 64 bit support than XP, but there are still some software and hardware out there which won't work properly on it.

Quote from garph :

I'm going to buy Vista but I thinking of getting the 64bit version. I was just wondering about any compatibility issues anyone has had with it and if you think it's wise to even go with the 64bit version at all?

Any advice is appreciated!

No need for Vista 64bit if you are not using 4Gb ram.

Quote from T.J. :

No need for Vista 64bit if you are not using 4Gb ram.

....I am running 4Gb of RAM!

Intel E6750
Gigabyte PC35-DS3R
4Gb PC6400
Nvdia 7950GX2

Quote from garph :

....I am running 4Gb of RAM!

Intel E6750
Gigabyte PC35-DS3R
4Gb PC6400
Nvdia 7950GX2

Then I would have chosen Vista 64bit. And I am in fact running Vista 64bit on my 4Gb laptop without problems

64-bit FTW.

Vista excels when you throw tons of RAM at it, and to do that, 64-bit is the way 2 go. On top of that, many (if not most) of all the early xp64 compatibility issues are gone away.

32-bit just limits you as you will never be able to utilize 4 or more GB of RAM.

Ok guys. What do you think. I've been putting off installing Vista on my desktop lately. I have XP on my laptop, which I use 99% of the time in college, and the desktop which I use solely to play games like COD2, LFS, etc... AND to watch ripped movies, play music and watch DVDs and TV through an open source program called MediaPortal. I'm considering upgrading it to Vista Enterprise SP1, which is hosted on our school's servers.

Suggestions? If anything I'm doing it cause I'm bored and I just want to see how it works. I DO have 4 Gb of RAM, and I'm not sure whether the version offered is 32 or 64 bit.

Quote from Stang70Fastback :

Ok guys. What do you think. I've been putting off installing Vista on my desktop lately. I have XP on my laptop, which I use 99% of the time in college, and the desktop which I use solely to play games like COD2, LFS, etc... AND to watch ripped movies, play music and watch DVDs and TV through an open source program called MediaPortal. I'm considering upgrading it to Vista Enterprise SP1, which is hosted on our school's servers.

Suggestions? If anything I'm doing it cause I'm bored and I just want to see how it works. I DO have 4 Gb of RAM, and I'm not sure whether the version offered is 32 or 64 bit.

SP1 for vista is out now.. Vista 32-bit will see all four gigs of ram now. By the time you _NEED_ more than 4GB of ram your motherboard will be far outdated anyways.

Quote from wtf im nameless :

SP1 for vista is out now.. Vista 32-bit will see all four gigs of ram now.

No, it just reads 4 GB of RAM in "My Computer" - 32-bit limitations still apply so 32-bit Vista will still only use 2.75-3.5 GB of RAM.

64bit is what i went for and i love it. lol at the 1'st lfs demo working on vista.

I wil echo "64-bit works fine and i love it" etc. The only issue is that you can't use unsigned drivers, and that you can't use Brazil on 64-bit.

Quote from Jakg :

The only issue is that you can't use unsigned drivers

People always say this, but is it true? I have a sound card which only has some rubbish unsigned beta drivers available and they work just fine on Vista 64. I just got the usual unsigned driver warning. It didn't prevent me from installing them at all.

You can use unsigned drivers on Vista 64 bit, Microsoft changed their minds about that a while back.
It's just that not all the unsigned drivers will work correctly, since a lot of them are just 32-bit drivers re-packaged.

Quote from need :

You can use unsigned drivers on Vista 64 bit, Microsoft changed their minds about that a while back.
It's just that not all the unsigned drivers will work correctly, since a lot of them are just 32-bit drivers re-packaged.

Oh - looks like I was wrong then :X

Quote from Jakg :

No, it just reads 4 GB of RAM in "My Computer" - 32-bit limitations still apply so 32-bit Vista will still only use 2.75-3.5 GB of RAM.

Interesting... I guess my excitement was premature.

Quote from wtf im nameless :

Interesting... I guess my excitement was premature.

It's a limit of the hardware achitecture, not the OS running on it. A 32-bit system will *never* be able to address the full 4GB.

I'm guessing the total it can address is exactly 4GB, powers of two and all that, but that includes things like graphics RAM which takes the amount of addressable system RAM down. The more memory your graphics card has, the less system ram it can see.

Yeah, with a 32 bit system the memory addressing is limited to 2^32 (unsigned for memory access) = 4096MB = 4GB. I believe it would be theoretically possible to address 2^64 memory addresses (by using similar techniques as emulating 64 bit numbers on 32 bit systems), but the amount by which your system would slow down would be too big a performance hit.

The total amount you'll have left to use will be 4GB minus various things (video card RAM being the biggest), so you'll end up with between 2.5 and 3.25GB left over to use. Those of us with video cards with 1GB of memory are shooting ourselves in the foot to some extent, but who needs 2+ gig of RAM

Vista does, that's who!

Well, strictly speaking there are 32bit machines with wider address buses. The Pentium PRO had a 36-bit address bus for instance, but these require explicit support from the OS to use, and are rare in consumer level platforms.

/pedant

I am sure games (and other programs) will need 2GB+ memory in the future (quite near future I might add) and also 64-bit OSses are the future too, sooner or later everyone who wants to have a powerfull computer will have to upgrade to it. The transition would happen a lot sooner though if the hardware manufacturers would get out of their arses and start developing some proper 64-bit drivers..

In my experience the 64bit version of Crysis on Vista can in fact get a bit choppy with "only" 2GB of memory. This is not from running out of memory directly though. It has to do with Superfetch misbehaving and hogging too much memory. Disabling Superfetch or adding 2 more GB of memory helps though, and with the dirt cheap memory available these days there's really no reason to not get at least 4GB if you're buying anyway.

Nice, with a bit of luck I'll get a chance to try out Vista 64bit with my hardware/software before I buy it.

Any other essential Vista tweaks?

UAC = Off,
Instal SP1,
Disable Readyboost Service.

also keep in mind that any 16 bit application wont run anymore
so forget playing old games watching demos or using older specialized software

Quote from amp88 :

but who needs 2+ gig of RAM

i regularly max out 6 gig and recently according to ps i went over 100% ram usage on a 16gig sun

trying to play ror my cpu usage somehow went to 120%

Quote from Shotglass :

also keep in mind that any 16 bit application wont run anymore
so forget playing old games watching demos or using older specialized software



i regularly max out 6 gig and recently according to ps i went over 100% ram usage on a 16gig sun

Hehe, read my white text

I realise there are some instances where you'd easily use 2+GB of RAM, but most of those would be in business or research where the chances are you wouldn't have the 32 bit problem anyway.