Vista 64 and More

I am a pretty active participant on several forums where I discuss everything from politics, religion, UFOs, to computers. Since I post a lot of these thoughts on my clan forums and avsforums, I usually feel "typed out" so that my blog suffers. That is why most of the blog is just funny things that I find on the web and not so much original content. To change this I've decided to take some of my forum posts and place them here. This will have the added benefit of keeping some of my thoughts in a place I can control and return to down the road.

The following was originally posted on avsforums thread (a place dedicated to home theaters and home theater PCs, one of my favorite hobbies) regarding my experience with switching to Vista x64 (that is 64bit Vista for those you are not as geeky as me.) This was posted yesterday. Coming soon will be some thoughts on Politics UFOs, and more!

I just last night completed my process of switching my HTPC over to Vista 64. I installed it a week or so ago and ran into some killer problems that all turned out to NOT be the fault of Vista.

FYI, for those switching. Do not install Bitdefender 2009. It is a buggy program that caused random freezes in Vista. Bitdefender 2008 works fine. Surprisingly, Norton 2009, runs really well. Norton was rewritten for performance and it shows. Works great.

Also, if you have slow framerate issues with Source games (HL2, TF2, etc) the problem could be your overclock. In my case, my overclocked E6400 to 3.2 ran fine with Orthos and Prime95 tests, but my source games framerates were terrible. Once I dialed it back to 2.8ghz, everything ran great. I think it maybe an issue with the ram timings or perhaps my motherboard (Asus p5b deluxe). I plan on doing more testing to see if I can get it working at 3.2. (This was the issue I resolved last night.)

Also, the slysoft beta of reclock did not work as well with Zoomplayer as the old 1.7 beta 4. The slysoft beta had odd invalid floating point errors in Zoomplayer, depending on the file and filters. These all disappeared with the 1.7 beta 4.

So overall, Vista 64 performs just as well as my old XP systems. And in some cases much better. I suspect Vista will speed up even more once the superfetch is optimized.

As an aside, in my trouble-shooting I thought that perhaps my 4gb of ram were a problem and ordered a different batch of 4 gb sticks. By the time, I had figured out that the ram wasn't the problem, it was too late to cancel the order... so the plus side is now I will have a probably unnecessary 8gb of ram.

Overall, I really like Vista x64. I like the Aero interface. I love the searching start bar. It is a silly reason, but I got so used to just typing the first few letters of the program I wanted on my work PC, that that little feature was a major reason for my to upgrade my HTPC. Finally, I really like the addressable 4gb or ram (or now in my case 8gb). It is probably more of an OCD geek kinda of thing... trying to take full advantage of the system I have, but I just thought it was a shame to have all that ram and not use it.

I am not a bleeding edge early adopter, but I do like being a little ahead of the curve. If you are like me, and don't mind tinkering, then I'd give Vista x64 SP1 my wholehearted recommendation. I installed it as a dual boot with my XP system, so that I could take the time to get it right, before I switched over. Also, I did a "trial" Vista x64 install that I tested my system and drivers with, before I did a clean install of what I intend to be my primary os. Now, that I have figured out all of my bugs, I intend to image my XP drive and wipe it to use the space. (I installed XP and Vista x64 on different harddrives.)

Good luck.

Hmm, rereading it, I use a lot of jargon. I promise the next few post will be more accessible.