silent running

I'm about to start building a new rig. Guessing the spec will be something like an Asus P5Q, E7200 or Q6600 CPU and 4 gig of DDR2 at least.

Is there any reason why I shouldn't get Vista 64 bit instead of 32 bit as they seem the same price? I will also be dual booting this system with XP if that makes any difference.

Cheers!

Ant

32 doesn't run that well with 4gb memory iirc. Someone had a problem with installing 32 with similar rig as yours

Iain Young

Vista 32 installs and runs just fine with 4gb of ram, (that's what I'm using at the moment). You will only see around 3gb of it though. If you want to install more ram then Vista64 will be required.

Note that Vista 64 does have mome problems with older applications that Vista 32 (because it requires different drivers, patches etc and generally isn't quite as well supported).

Performance wise, I doubt you'd see a difference between 32 and 64bit. It's only when you get to bigger ram installations etc that you start to notice a difference.

boxst

Check your motherboard supports it -- most of the new ones do. I went to the effort of installing 64 bit Vista and realised that I still couldn't use more than 3gb memory as the bios couldn't cope.

But generally things work fine. I have Microsoft VM running XP should I need to load some strange old program that doesn't like Vista.

Steve

john_s

iTrader: (1)

Haven't had any trouble with Vista 64 on my new PC as yet.

BTW, it won't cost much more to up the RAM to 8GB, so that's worth considering.

silent running

Well the setup will be the Vista 64 OS as my 'home' installation - i.e. looks good, runs Office, IE, iTunes, video etc. Then my XP will be old school and pared down to the bare minimum of drivers to run as an audio workstation, without even an internet connection if I can fix it like that.

So it sounds like Vista 64 is the thing to go for. It's not as if I've got tons of old stuff that needs to run on it.

Iain Young

Last time I tried it, iTunes had a lot of trouble when running on 64bit Vista, (i.e. it didn't work at all - a well documented "feature"). Not sure if it's been fixed yet, but it's one of the many software incompatibilities that threw me back to the 32bit OS...

judgejules

I've been running Vista Ultimate 64bit on 8GB of ram for about a year and a half now with no problems at all. Had no problems with iTunes either.

As mentioned above, you wont get to use all the 4GB if you go with 32bit.

J

Iain Young

Interesting, I couldn't even get iTunes to install on 64bit Vista. After googling around it seems I wasn't the only one (hundreds of posts about it on the interweb), and Apple said they had no plans to support the 64 bit platform. This was about 6 months ago so they may have changed their position since I suppose...

I only saw 3gb with the 64 bit OS installed as well. Up to 4gb, it's up to the bios how much you can actually use (nothing to do with the OS)...

Blairc

Hi mate,
I've just put together my own PC. Went for the P5Q deluxe and E8400 with 64bit vista. No problems at all.
One word of caution, I initially planned to go for the P5Q myself and therefore ordered the DDR2 memory. Only to change my mind at the last minute and go for the P5Q Deluxe which naturally uses DDR3! Not the end of the world but a pain.

James Neill

iTrader: (1)

No problems here with 64 bit Vista here. Running 8GB and about 8TB of disk . Apple do a specific 64 bit version of iTunes now too.

Iain Young

Maybe it's time to try it again then. Had real trouble with it 6 months ago...

judgejules

Ah there we go, iTunes 7.6 enabled support for Vista 64bit and was released on 15th Jan 2008. Guess I was using winamp before that

silent running

Well I've had such problems with iTunes even in XP that I make it a rule to stay at least 6 months behind the latest version until they iron out the bugs.

So presumably my XP32 installation will not see any of the memory over 3 gig then? I am wondering whether to dual boot it as two installations of Vista 64 then. Depends how easily Vista can be stripped down to the bare essentials for my audio processing needs. Or maybe even run just one installation to do everything.