hello there i have a question, a friend has a legal copy of Window XP 64-bit that he is willing to sell as he recently purchased vista ulimate x64. i have been considering vista home prem but he is willing to sell his copy of xp at a much lower price and tbh would be silly not to buy it. Before you jump the gun, i dont game, and if i get the bug to play a game its usually retro (DX9C) lol! this summer i wish to get vista but again that will be 64-bit. so is it worth buying the 64-bit version of XP, my machine is mainly work based, solidworks 2008, autoCad 2008 and CS3 creative suit, i understand that 64-bit can run 32-bit app's i.e Office 2003 pro. the reason for all this is i have another 2GB of cruical ballistix PC6400C4 on its way, to match with my current 2GB, seriously good memory, been running at 1200mhz for a while 1GHz for a while!
AFAIK, XP Pro x64 has a bit bad driver support. You're just better out with Vista or normal XP. (Please someone correct me if I'm wrong)
XP 64bit is pretty much dead nowadays. It was poorly supported when it was released & is still poorly supported now. Better off with 32Bit XP imo. At least 99.99% of software/hardware will work. Plus the performance gains from having 64bit compared to 32Bit are negligible. Best get Vista 64bit if you want to run 4GB of memory. I'm running 4GB in my 32Bit XP - but I only get 3.25Gb available - But I'm happy with that.
Like I said some time ago: you can perfectly use WinXP 64-but... just have several boxes containsing several bottles of advils and tylenol, yes you will need both as your headache will be hurting quiet a lot. When I tested WinXP 64-bit... die to the awful driver support and lack of Microsoft support, it was like XP pre-SP1 bugs X2 or X4 even. You are better off with XP 32-bit SP2. Frankly, you have to pay me to use it. However, if you want to run 64-bit applications, get a little performance boost (negligible in games, not so negligible in application), and want to have 4 or more GB of RAM, and unlock you CPU potential (I mean you got a 64-bit CPU for something), and of course have all your 32-bit applications work, and great (just as good as 32-bit) driver support, go with Vista 64-bit. Just make sure your printer and other external peripheral have 64-bit drivers (32-bit drivers won't work). If your external peripherals has XP 64-bit drivers however no Vista 64-bit driver, the device should still work with XP 64-bit drivers installed in Vista 64-bit.
I had XP Pro x64 installed until about a month ago. It was driving me utterly and completely mad. Even with updated drivers, etc., I was getting blue screens and occasional other errors. And that is after a reinstall. I switched back to x32 and the same build has been rock-solid since. I was quite sad it didn't work out.
Running it now. Driver support sucks, but it is a functional OS unless you need some weird bit of hardware. I haven't had any stability problems with it, but I do find it to be slower that linux on the same machine.
I'm running XP X64 on my main rig; with the SP2 it's quite good. The only thing to keep in mind is that driver support from peripheral vendors (e.g. HP printers/scanners) is somewhat limited; but all the critical stuff (chipset, graphics, LAN, etc) is supported from their respective manufacturers.
I'm using it on my computer right now, ran into some issues with one bit of hardware, or something how i installed the drivers for my peripherals, it works fine, no problems with it. Basically what radorill and cthippo said, i can agree with. if it's cheap go for it. Keep in mind, it can be hit or miss with it.
i think as the mixed views a shall give xp 64-bit a miss, to much hassle to setup the OS for just 3 months until i can afford vista home prem 64-bit. i got my extra memory today, plus a new 250GB HDD so i install XP pro (32-bit)
wow, where did all the xp64 hate come from? bad driver support? since when? if there's a vista64 driver there's an xp64 driver, i've yet to see any different... as for stability: exactly the same as 32bit xp apart from the different boot logo and the extra ram support, you essentially won't notice any difference to 32bit xp
not always the case; most notably HP printers. I know for a fact that they have released a Vista 64-bit driver for their Color Laserjet 2600n, but have yet to release an XP X64 version of the driver. I actually like XP X64 and the only piece of hardware that I have that isn't supported is my TI-89 calculator. As for Vista I hate the crap out of it and won't downgrade to it ant time soon.
Dunno why all the bad press... XP Pro x64 with SP2 is a great OS. Driver support??? I haven't run into a problem at all. I too have 4 gigs of RAM which is why I switched to XP x64 and it's been great. Compare it to vista x64 and you'll see why Vista is a bloated hog in general. My vote is for XP.
Dunno why all the bad press... Vista 64-bit SP1 is a great OS. It is no more "bloated" than XP! Wonderful stability and driver support, and lets not even go about responsiveness, as it maskers it in that area. My vote is for Vista. What take the RAM is SuperFetch. It's space is flexible. Try this. On a 2GB configuration with Vista 64-bit (it will work if you have more, but the values will be different, however the idea is there). When I startup Windows Vista 64-bit, 1GB is in use. However, when I press on my keyboard the IM and E-mail button to launch those, they start at an amazing speed ('cause they already loaded). When I play a game like The Witcher, and quit the game. If you quickly open teh Task Manager you will see that your RAM is about 300MB in use, and quickly increase to ~750MB and stay like that for some time and increase back to about 1GB like when you start Windows Vista. I see no resources hogging here! If you want to complain about these stuff, then go to Adobe forum, and bombard them with post on how idiotic their developers is, on making their software. Look how much memory and CPU power it uses to do simple task. Did you try to fast scroll a big PDF with Adobe Reader? Good luck! It will get lost and start scrolling in the opposite direction than what you actually scrolled the wheel (if you can achieve this, try with the fast scroll wheel of the MX revolution. Use any other program like Foxit Reader (Adobe Reader like program) and it has no difficulty at all. Now that is resource hog! Or how about Win98 and the SE edition. Go to a folder where you have many sub folders, do Ctrl+A, then ENTER, what all the folders open, now do ALT+F4 to close them all, do that a second and perhaps a tird time, and you will see that you won't be able to open a folder, or even a menu. A reboot is required.
Let's not get into the whole XP vs Shista Vista superiority debate. I prefer XP and know countless others on various forums that hate Vista; it's just personal preference; but I respect the opinion of those who like the new M$ software. Back to the topic of XP X64; in general driver support is very good, but there are a few peripheral manufacturers who have not releases XP X64 drivers for some/all of their hardware; this is primarily for certain specialized hardware (e.g. TI calculator) but also for HP printers/scanners.
