32 or 64 bit Visa / XP? Need Feedback

I don't think you use all your 4 GB RAM unless it is 64 bit.

true
32 bit can only do 3.2GB if i remember correctly...
the question is basically: is the hassle of going for XP64 worth it to avoid vista? getting all drivers and such...
am also looking for experience from people who are on 64bit XP... would they go for it again, ...
looking for any input

I use 64-bit Vista and I am perfectly happy with it. My experience is that anyone that I've known that has actually *used* Vista, turned off UAC and Aero - love it.

Exactly... all the hate and pissing and moaning i've seen since vista came out made me hold off... been on an Vista64 machine for about 3 weeks now and i'm loving it.. 8 Gigs of RAM.. works beautifully.

I have 64 bit Vista with 16 gigs of ram.

I love the 64 bit. Hate Vista.

Everything on it is difficult and requires you to hunt through the internet to find solutions for the million problems it has.

Unfortunately for me...Adobe Photoshop CS4 is designed to go 64 bit only with Vista so in order to use it to it's full potential I had to go to Vista.

I actually like Vista as far as being an operating system. But it's networking is a nightmare

I have a gigabyte ethernet card. Thing was setup to do "auto" (as it should be) in the speed in the configuration of the card (which they also changed how to get to that so it requires you to hunt it down whereas in all previous versions of windows it was a couple of clicks to see your properties for your connection)

Anyway, I kept getting kicked offline at random intervals. Just suddenly would have the limited connection. And then when I would try to "repair" it to get a new ip...the computer would NOT do it. And then it won't reboot! You have to hard boot it down.

And microsoft has NO help for you. Far as I could tell they don't even mention it. So I had to search google...where I found thousands of folks dealing with the same problem.

To stop it you have to go into the configuration and choose 10 mb half speed for you card. Fucking crazy.

Then I bought my oldest daughter a new computer a couple of weeks ago. Since it's in her room we ran it wireless. Welcome to the next Vista nightmare.

Kept knocking her offline every few minutes!

Had to do a big search on that as well, since Microsoft has nothing up about it.

Vista has IPv4 that we have all used since day one AND IPv6 which is the future. But for some reason there setup causes a conflict. So you have to disable the IPv6 to get wireless networking to work reliably.

No mention of that from Microsoft. Had to find that on a techie blog after searching high and low.

I won't even waste your time with the problems it has in changing peoples monitor profiles and fucking up graphics. Needless to say I wasted a lot of frustrating time hunting that one down on the internet and finding a solution.

But if you're gonna go 64 bit it does kick ass to do so. And once you've wasted a good amount of time researching and finding all the fixes the operating system is pretty stable.

From what I've read, Vista will soon be relegated to the trash heap in much the same way that Millenium was.

Microsoft is supposedly working hard to release Windows 7 to replace it.

I might be wrong but I'm sure someone told me loads of software isn't compatible with 64-bit. Like I said, I might be wrong...

Oh and for what it's worth, my opinion of Vista in general is that it's absolutely fucking appauling. I've been on it since the turn of the year and I have had endless problems with it.

Vista runs the programs that aren't designed for 64 bit as 32 bit programs. The main one that really sucks is flash. Since flash doesn't run on 64 bit YET, you can't run a 64 bit browser.

But they just recently released a 64 bit version for linux and are saying on their site that 64 bit for windows is coming soon.

But yeah, most programs can't do 64 bit yet. For instance, Photoshop DOES...which is real cool. But Premiere Pro doesn't! Which is kinda dumb since vid work is where I use the most juice. But it's coming in the near future.

I run vista and don't really have any probs with it other than the 'nag-ware' aspects of the OS

But have you viewed your photos in panoramic view yet?
One of the many features I live for!
http://www.youtube.com/v/BgzhMdAgzc4&hl=en&fs=1

Vista is great(I have 64bit 8GB ram), but its a little too secure for my tastes. It was a nightmare getting my other XP machines to talk with it. Everything is perceived as an attack, even benign network requests. get past those issues, and you'll love it. There are no software or driver compatibility issues I've encountered yet.

go 64 i have it 0 problems

Thank you, you just answered a question for me. May I ask a second?

How easy is it for a total n00b, with his very first pc, running Vista, to set it to 32 bit?

The best way to run Vista:

Vista will become a bad memory soon, Microsoft even knows that it is shit.

The new Windows will be out this year, and soon there will be more XP and new Windows users than Vista


Vista is an operating system that most people should really just skip right over, XP is better for most of us now, and then the new Windows will be better than Vista ever was

I'm not sure what you mean. You either have a 32 bit version or a 64 bit version of the operating system. If you have the 64 bit version it will install any 32 bit software as 32 bit in the Program Files (x86) folder. And it will be in the start menu and work just like it should and always did on previous versions of windows. Is that what you meant?

If you have the 32 bit version then of course you can only run 32 bit software (which is what the majority of stuff is) but you have no room to grow into the future. For instance I have 16 gigs of ram now, expandable to 64 gigs if I just felt like throwing money around for no good reason lol

thanks so far
anyone have any experience with XP 64?

I bought a new HP for my assistant and when shopping for it I found most of them came with vista 64.. No problems so far.

We have Flash tutorials in our knowledge base. We have been getting a ton of new clients that are using Vista. Many of them have said they can not view the tutorials. Others have come back and said they figured out some setting that allowed them to view them. I would like to know what to tell those that can't figure it out what to do.

They insist their Flash player is installed and on.

Yep sounds about right - from what I've heard Vista has just been a (somewhat unnecessary) stop-gap between XP and the next version of Windows.

I just checked out your knowledgebase and both the exe downloads, and the inline flash files played fine...

baddog, there are a couple of things I can possibly think of.

The dumbest one would be that they are running vista 64 bit and using the 64 bit browser which at this time won't support flash

The more probable one would be a java issue. ???

And when I say "java issue" I mean on the user side...as in they don't have it

has far as Windows (for the desktop goes) Vista is the best

I dealt with Vista (32bit) on a laptop that was made for XP and hated it. I got a new laptop with Vista (32bit) after my main XP laptop died and was planning on dumping Vista and installing XP again, but I found that Vista ran quite well. It can be a little quirky sometimes, but I actually prefer it to XP now. Once Windows 7 Sp1 is out I'll probably make the jump to 64 bit.

anyone went from Vista to XP64? Would love to hear some feedback on that
thanks all others so far

I use 64bit Vista, no problems

Thanks. The problem is, I will probably have to pay a personal visit to their homes to "fix it."

dualboot
xp32 and vista32

in xp32 you'll have "only" 3,2 gb available ram and in vista you'll have whole 4gb...
64 is pretty useless because of driver and software issues...
it makes sense only for some pro work (for eg. databases that can utilize 64-bit infrastructure etc...)

from what i read you can not utilize 4gb in vista 32