You’ve all heard about the rig I’ve got at home now. Quad-core pentium, dual monitors, big disk, and so on. Well, I’m upset. I’m running out of memory. Windows keeps telling me to shut down apps.
Why? Windows Vista 32 bit. It has a cap of 3G of memory. Actually, it’s 4G, but that includes the address space on the video card, for you technically precise folks. Practically that means that with a 512M video card, I’m stuck at 3G of memory.
Now, I could upgrade to Windows Vista 64bit and break that limitation, but then several key pieces of software I use wouldn’t be available. Like the Windows Home Server connector.
As much as I would like to think it, it doesn’t seem as if the industry is ready for 64 bit yet.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
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I made the jump at work to 64 bit (and put 6gb RAM in my system), half-expecting to be fighting an uphill battle when it came to software.. and it actually didn't go that badly.
The WHS connector doesn't affect me of course (and that one would be a show-stopper for me at home since I use it there), but there were drivers for all the other common devices I used (mouse, Xerox printer, all the built-in hardware (It's a Dell system)).
I don't sync my iPod at work so I don't know if that would work or not. I do sync my Treo 680, and for that I run Outlook and the Treo driver in a VM. I fire up the VM, plug in the Treo, and the VM sees the new device instead of the host system.
About the biggest thing that's affecting me is that Visual Studio's C++ profiler won't profile a 32 bit app on a 64 bit system, and the other profiler I use doesn't completely work in the same situation, but it does work well enough to let me get the data I need.
The extra RAM makes a huge difference. Enough to be worth considering a different backup strategy?
Heh, there's a lot of other reasons you don't want to go Vista
this situation has improved a little in the last year but here was my initial experience with 64bit: http://www.thomaspurves.com/2007/04/04/things-tha…
but basic compatibility aside, there's not a day that goes by as I don't often want to hurl the vista box out the window. The UI is hideously tacky, almost every interface change seems to get in the way rather than help me as a user get anything done, the new file explorer drives me nuts, wildly over-zealous security protections make a lot of things like sharing files to be a painful, and it's really slow on any hardware you put it on.
stick with XP
or a mac