64 Bit Computing – Trials and Tribulations

I like many other people have managed to sit quite happily with Windows XP 32bit for many moons without breaking a sweat, after years I have been able to attain a rock solid and completely stable environment… that is until I decided to upgrade my laptop and was forced to go with a 64 bit edition of Microsoft Windows.

As my new laptop has 8GB of RAM this was the factor that forced me into a 64 bit operating system. As the support for Windows XP 64 bit has never been that spectacular (especially with hardware vendors), I decided that sadly Windows Vista was my only option. I thought I had managed to scrape by and skip over another Microsoft Blunder (think back to Windows ME!) however that is beside the point, here we are and Vista 64 bit is what I had to go with.

I did however want to put together a short list of issues that I have encountered as a part of upgrading to 64 bit, I would like to note as Vista is also completely new to me that some of these issues may in fact be specifically linked to Vista and not so much the 64 bit jump.

The Issues:

1. Hardware Support for a few of my more obscure peripherals (such as my Logitech Harmony 785 remote) is not available.
2. I find myself constantly having to check if the 64 bit version of the OS is supported when I purchase or download new software. (For example the Australian Tax Office software to submit my tax return, won’t work on Vista 64 bit).
3. Not many software vendors support 64 bit: This may not sound like much of a problem, and similar to my last point, however software like TotalIdea’s TweakVI is currently in a buggy beta on the 64 bit edition of Vista. I am starting to find that a lot of the software that *is* in fact currently available in 64 bit is still in beta and nowhere near as well tested.
4. With 64 bit, there are some programs (especially those that integrate tightly with the Operating System) that must support 64 bit and currently not all of those do.
5. and the last major issue is Internet Browsing. Vista comes with a 64 bit version of Internet Explorer and plugins such as Flash (the worst offender I have seen thus far) does not yet have 64 bit support so I am forced to use the 32 bit version. This has also become apparent in another issue, for programs like Java, I now need to install and maintain two completely seperate version, the 32 bit and the 64 bit if I want it to work in both browsers (and Firefox).

I guess those have been my main problems that I have discovered thus far. On the bright side however there have been some good points with going 64 bit as well, including:

1. I can now use the full 8GB of RAM.
2. Additional processing performance when using 64 bit applications as opposed to the 32 bit counterpart.
3. I can now run 64 bit Linux installations in VMware Workstation, this has been a HUGE plus.

For anyone that does read this (hard to get a readership on only my second article ) I would be curious to know, have you made the jump to 64 bit and if so how did you find it and what issues did you face?

Stuart

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