My Vista 64-bit experience

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JimmiG

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Apr 3, 2008
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After upgrading to 4GB of RAM I decided to give Vista 64-bit a try since I was only able to utilize about 3.3 GB with Vista 32-bit. Here are the problems I've encountered so far.

-The only 64-bit drivers for my M-Audio Delta1010LT audiocard are beta. I was aware of that but I figured they should still work fine - most of us use some beta software every day and it usually works fine. However it turned out they're not just beta, but private beta. I had to search all over the net to find a working download link that the M-Audio police force hadn't pulled yet. The betas seem to work fine so far, though.

-One day when waking the computer from sleep mode, my entire harddrive was corrupted and unreadable. Chkdsk only managed to partially restore the files. My first thought was unstable overclock or virus but neither seemed to be the case. After lots of head scratching and some googling, I found that this is due to a *design flaw* of the Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe mobo. In some cases when running Vista 64-bit with 4GB of RAM or more, the board will simply corrupt your entire harddrive(s) when you put the machine into S3 sleep mode. After hours of data recovery, I got most of my data back and disabled S3 sleep in BIOS. S1 sleep doesn't corrupt my drives, but it doesn't work very well either - 50% of the time the system won't wake from sleep mode.

-My D drive will randomly write-protect itself. A reboot, unplugging and reconnecting the drive, the Replace Owner feature or Diskpart will fix that temporarily. After anything from a few minutes to several days, the drive will magically have write protected itself again. This is apparently also a known issue with Vista 64-bit... I googled for the problem and found tons of posts about the issue, all from users running Vista 64-bit and none from users of XP or Vista 32-bit.

-Signed drivers requirement is a pain..some software like IP blocker, virtual CD, even Starforce protected games won't work anymore.

This is on a system that was rock solid with no issues at all under 32-bit Vista.
I still have my 32bit Vista install image'd and I'm seriously considering putting it back. Guess I'll give the 64-bit version a little more time but so far I'm not impressed.
 
I have had the same reservations. I'm sitting w/ 3GB of RAM with Vista 32bit, waiting for 64 to go a bit more mainstream before I take the plunge. At times I wish they'd just go with the 'band-aid removal' approach and just remove 32bit in one quick swoop and force drivers to 64bit.

After hearing your experience, I think I'll stand back a bit longer.
 
JimmiG said:
-Signed drivers requirement is a pain..some software like IP blocker, virtual CD, even Starforce protected games won't work anymore.
Click to expand...

what kindof issues is this?

i just switched over to Vista64 and i have installed some device drivers that aren't signed but they appear to work fine..

i'm curious so i know what to watch out for when it dos happen..

i've only been going with vista64 for about 3 weeks now..

So far the only issue i've run into is Nikon's NEF codec doesn't work in the Explorer64.. only Explorer32;
 
DaemonTools has a 64 bit version that works perfectly with Vista x64, and the driver is signed properly.

As for installing non-signed drivers in Vista x64, that ain't gonna happen by default unless:

a) you bypass the requirement for signed drivers with the F8 menu option during the boot process, or...

b) you permanently disable that requirement by modifying the boot parameters
 
JimmiG said:
-My D drive will randomly write-protect itself. A reboot, unplugging and reconnecting the drive, the Replace Owner feature or Diskpart will fix that temporarily. After anything from a few minutes to several days, the drive will magically have write protected itself again. This is apparently also a known issue with Vista 64-bit... I googled for the problem and found tons of posts about the issue, all from users running Vista 64-bit and none from users of XP or Vista 32-bit.
Click to expand...

Had this happen also ONLY with my onboard RAID 0 enabled (Gigabyte DS3). Disabled all RAID and have been trucking along just fine.
 
-One day when waking the computer from sleep mode, my entire harddrive was corrupted and unreadable. Chkdsk only managed to partially restore the files. My first thought was unstable overclock or virus but neither seemed to be the case. After lots of head scratching and some googling, I found that this is due to a *design flaw* of the Asus M3A32-MVP Deluxe mobo. In some cases when running Vista 64-bit with 4GB of RAM or more, the board will simply corrupt your entire harddrive(s) when you put the machine into S3 sleep mode. After hours of data recovery, I got most of my data back and disabled S3 sleep in BIOS. S1 sleep doesn't corrupt my drives, but it doesn't work very well either - 50% of the time the system won't wake from sleep mode.
Click to expand...

If this was me I would have just deposited the motherboard into the nearest trash can. Nuking your entire HD is a fairly significant "design flaw", Asus should just offer to replace it or something.
 
Yeah. I don't like the lack of support for Vista 64 bit. It's not horrible (or i'd take it off my laptop and my gaming rig) but sometimes it's just not as smooth of an experience as i'd like.

In my opinion Vista 64 bit is getting more mainstream...

I work at staples and the majority of new laptops we got in have Vista 64 bit (HP, Dell, Acer, Compaq). So if retail places are starting to get them in that pretty much means most new laptops will be 64 bit, therefore most companies will start giving 64 bit a bit more love.
 
ocellaris said:
If this was me I would have just deposited the motherboard into the nearest trash can. Nuking your entire HD is a fairly significant "design flaw", Asus should just offer to replace it or something.
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x2

I was running XP 64bit and "downgraded" to standard XP Pro due to some driver and interface issues that were working my nerves. Several weeks ago I made the jump to Vista 64 due to a notable difference in speed from XP 64 to XP pro. I was EXTREMELY hesitant to make the leap to Vista but thus far am just about issue free and have noticed a vast increase in speed.

I do have the starforce problem as well. Though I paid $1 for the game so I am not extremely upset about the lack of ability to play it on my desktop. I have XP on my laptop so on there it will go. I do not have any of the other issues that you are complaining about.

I'm running a Evga 780i board with a C2Q 6700. Evga 8800 video card with 4gb of ram. 5 SATA HDD's and 2 IDE DVD burners.
 
Yikes, those problems are not cool.

Knock on wood, zero problems for over a month on my new comp w/ Vista 64bit.

I detest ASUS, so there was zero chance of me using one.

Gigabyte mobo, 4GB RAM, e8400, ati 4850
 
specs in sig

vista 64 running great so far! another round of hardware and i may upgrade my rig. i'd love to use vista with 4-8gb ram and a quad core. :)
 
Xmas would mark my first year into V64. I only really had issue with the signed driver thing for hardware development but then it's not really an issue if you run vmware since it can see USB devices on the host.
 
That really sucks that the mobo nuked your HD. I made the jump to x64 about a month ago and I am really pleased. I upgraded only because I added more RAM to the system. Seriously consider a new mobo.
 
Had this happen also ONLY with my onboard RAID 0 enabled (Gigabyte DS3). Disabled all RAID and have been trucking along just fine.
Click to expand...

It might be some issue related to the 64-bit AHCI driver.. I have no idea but it seems to be a fairly common problem with Vista 64-bit, try searching for something like "vista drive write protected" (mins quotes). Some are due to user error (people editing permissions without having a clue what they mean) but a surprising number of users' harddrives write protect themselves magically for no reason at all.
Running Diskpart, selecting the write protected volume and then running the "Attributes volume clear readonly" always makes the drive writable again.. I have to run this command at least once a day on my D drive.

what kindof issues is this?

i just switched over to Vista64 and i have installed some device drivers that aren't signed but they appear to work fine..

i'm curious so i know what to watch out for when it dos happen..
Click to expand...

If a driver is unsigned and you try to install it, Vista will display a message saying the driver can't be loaded. You have to reboot and press F8, then disable the requirement for signed drivers every time you want to use an unsigned driver. Before SP1 it was easier to make Vista load unsigned drivers. Getting your driver signed apparently costs $500 a year so independant shareware/freeware programs that use a virtual device driver will never work.

If this was me I would have just deposited the motherboard into the nearest trash can. Nuking your entire HD is a fairly significant "design flaw", Asus should just offer to replace it or something.
Click to expand...

I agree and my next board won't be an Asus one. Asus themselves obviously won't acknowledge the problem officially, but it's pretty obvious that this board has problems with sleep modes. According to one user, Asus support simply told him to select S1 sleep mode only (a more shallow sleep mode than S3, where the fans remain spinning etc.) in BIOS setup as a "solution" to the problems. I will also contact Asus support about this and see what kind of response I get - not that I'm expecting a response but you can always hope. If they can not offer a real solution for the problem I will ask them if it's possible to exchange the board for a 790FX/SB750-based board, since the M3A32-MVP Deluxe is flawed and I can't risk my data like this. The least they should do is admit the problem and remove S3 sleep support from the BIOS alltogether - even if the flaw doesn't affect everyone. It's no wonder the M3A32-MVP Deluxe is not on AMD's recommended mobo list - it's basically a rushed, cheap design hidden behind those fancy heatpipes and solid capacitors.

Sounds more like problems with your motherboard and sound card to me.
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Yeah, you can't blame Vista itself for most of those issues, but they did affect my experience with Vista 64-bit in a very negative way. The system was rock solid under Vista 32-bit - I experienced none of the issues mentioned: sleep mode worked fine, the drives were always writeable, drivers were available for everything etc.

There's a huge thread over at the M-Audio support forum about the lack of 64-bit drivers. They've promised to deliver at least public beta drivers for years now but all they've managed to produce so far is a leaked 64-bit driver from early 2008. I'll add M-Audio, along with Asus, to my list of brands to avoid in the future.

Others might be more lucky - if you don't have this flawed mobo, use some other sound card, don't experience the write protect issue etc. the transition should be smoother.
 
As a suggestion, I'd send M-Audio a nice e-mail telling them how, as a paying customer, you aren't very happy that they still don't have working drivers for Vista x64. None of the other sound card companies seem to be having these issues anymore (which you could remind them). Even Creative Labs has worked their issues out.

As for the driver signing, I'm not downplaying your issues, but in about a year and a half of using Vista x64 exclusively, I haven't come across that problem on any of several systems. I do remember something like CoreTemp not working, but I could easily find an alternative.
 
The latest coretemp (you should be using realtemp anyway) has an x64 signed driver now.

I thought there was a command line switch to disable forced driver signing? Or is that not permanent?
 
Sorry to hear about your problems. My transition to Vista 64 bit from 32 bit was almost totally painless. First I made sure all my hardware had 64 bit drivers and software had 64 bit counterparts. All of my hardware did, unfortunately my software did not. I had to purchase new versions of software that ran fine in 32 bit Vista. Price of progress I guess.

As for the whole sleep issue, In my opinion thats a nice idea Microsoft had but just dont work right , period. I've been fixing PC's for a lot of years and I have rarely seen sleep mode work correctly. It's hit or miss and in my opinion should just be turned off.

As far as your souncard goes I'd either run your onboard sound or buy a different card that has proper drivers. As long as Vista has been out it is inexcusable for drivers to not be available.

I've not run into the issues you're having with the drive randomly write protecting itself. I don't know if this would be anything or not, but when ever I go to run something in Vista I always do a right click on the executable and pick run as administrator, probably means nothing, just thinking out loud. Do you run your machine as administrator/owner or is it a User account? that could make a difference.

I've been running Vista for several years, started out as beta tester then migrated to Vista 32 bit, then almost a year ago made the switch to 64 bit. It has not been totally painless, but mostly so. I absolutely love 64 bit Vista and will ever go with anything less again.
Have only had trouble with a couple of games not wanting to run, Overlord, had to run that in XP compatability mode. Can't run GTA3 or 2 at all, they'll only work in 16 bit and Vista 64 won't do 16 bit.
Everything else runs great, it's faster than XP Pro and one helluva lot more stable.
:D
 
H-street said:
what kindof issues is this?

i just switched over to Vista64 and i have installed some device drivers that aren't signed but they appear to work fine..

i'm curious so i know what to watch out for when it dos happen..
Click to expand...
VMWare, the last time I checked, did not have signed drivers for at least the free VMWare software. It would throw a fit during the install and trying to use it. I had to use F8 and disable driver signing every boot. I eventually switched to Virtualbox which has signed drivers (and I like it better anyway).
 
As for the whole sleep issue, In my opinion thats a nice idea Microsoft had but just dont work right , period.
Click to expand...

I've also found that sleep mode is fairly unreliable, especially under XP and earlier. However having the board corrupt the whole harddrive just from entering sleep mode is a little too extreme. Black screen, error messages, automatic reboots, BSODs - sure, those are "acceptable". But losing data is not under any circumstances acceptable. Thanks to recent backups done to an external drive and DVD's, plus the use of NTFS file recovery software, I was able to reconstruct most of my data but it took almost a whole day.

As a suggestion, I'd send M-Audio a nice e-mail telling them how, as a paying customer, you aren't very happy that they still don't have working drivers for Vista x64.
Click to expand...

They already know, trust me :) They have said that they are working to improve the development process for quicker turnaround of drivers.. people are jokingly saying that maybe they will have Vista 64-bit drivers out by the time Windows 7 ships :p

As far as your souncard goes I'd either run your onboard sound or buy a different card that has proper drivers.
Click to expand...

I can't use onboard because I use my computer to make music, among other things. Replacing the 1010LT with an equivalent card from some other company would cost at least $200 while many are over $400. Fortunately the leaked betas seem to work fairly well. It's still unacceptable that as a paying customer I had to search all over the net for leaked drivers, then sign up for an account on some file download site, potentially registering for spam, not to mention the risk of the drivers containing virues or trojans.

The most annoying issue that remains is the write protection issue. It's incredibly annoying when you try to copy some files to the drive only to have an error message about the drive being write protected thrown in your face. I'll try to repartition and reformat it but I don't think that will help. Not sure what else to try.
 
this is why you gotta do research before you make the jump to Vista x64

Issues I had when moving my vostro 1400 to Vista Ultimate x64

1. non working audio drivers
2. no ethernet drivers
3. no touch pad drivers- just generic mouse driver

Thankfully most of Dell's laptops use the same basic hardware so it was just a matter of getting the vista x64 drivers from the approperiate dell business machine like a lattitude d series
 
I've not run into the issues you're having with the drive randomly write protecting itself. I don't know if this would be anything or not, but when ever I go to run something in Vista I always do a right click on the executable and pick run as administrator, probably means nothing, just thinking out loud. Do you run your machine as administrator/owner or is it a User account? that could make a difference.
Click to expand...

My user account is an admin account. I've also tried disabling UAC. I don't think it's a permissions issue, but rather Windows thinks the actual physical drive is write protected (like the plastic tab on old 3.5" floppy disks). It doesn't say "permission denied", it actually sais the drive is "Write Protected" and tells me to "remove the write protection".

Here's a shot from the Disk Management applet. Now the totally crazy part, is that almost every time I press F5 to refresh the view, the status of one or both drives changes. First both drives might be "Read Only", then C: might be "Online" while D: remains "Read Only", then when pressing F5 again, both drives might be Online, or C: might be "Read Only" while D: is "Online" etc. The status seems to change totally at random every few seconds.



I'm going to re-install Vista x64 now to see if the issue goes away. If it does not, I'm going back to 32-bit Vista for now.
 
Ok I reinstalled Vista x64 clean and installed drivers and updates one at a time to try and find the cause.

Everything was working great until I installed the AMD AHCI driver. Once it was installed and the system had been rebooted, the crazy Read Only/Online cycle started again.

It looks like AMD does not have a working 64-bit AHCI driver for the SB600 southbridge at this point. Either that or it's specific to this mobo.

As far as I can see 99% of your issues are due to the M/B. If I had a gun I would have took it down to the shooting range.
Click to expand...

This motherboard recieved top marks from HardOCP in their review. Their only complaint was that that the Phenoms and X2's did not keep up with Intel's offering, but they had nothing to complain about as far as the actual mobo was concerned. It was called "well designed", "stable", and an "outstanding product".

Clearly just testing a mobo for a couple of days is not enough to get a feel for it. You need to be using it for months before any problems or issues surface.
 
Hypernova said:
As far as I can see 99% of your issues are due to the M/B. If I had a gun I would have took it down to the shooting range.
Click to expand...

Yeah, a board should not be corrupting your data. On sleep, wake, Saturdays, etc. If a board were doing that to me, I would junk it so fast. Pretty much anything that doesn't behave properly under sleep gets my seal of disapproval. I currently have an E-MU 1616M PCI (relatively nice) sound card sitting on my shelf because the 64-bit driver can't wake up after sleep...

It sucks you've had such a problem with 64-bit Vista. I have had a few teething issues myself. I do a fair amount of music production, and I found out that a lot of Native Instruments VST Plugins seem to hate 64-bit Vista. After a lot of tweaking I got everything running perfectly, but it was kind of a headache at first.

My opinion is that it's not worth having to fuck with too much, so if your motherboard or sound is giving you all sorts of grief, either buy a new computer or stick with 32-bit Vista. You probably don't need 8gb of RAM, so no need to worry.

JimmiG said:
It looks like AMD does not have a working 64-bit AHCI driver for the SB600 southbridge at this point. Either that or it's specific to this mobo.
Click to expand...
Sucks... that could definitely explain your data corruption.

So what's it gonna be? New motherboard or "old" OS ;) ?
 
The data corruption from sleep mode is unrelated to the AHCI issue from what I can tell. As long as the computer is not put into S3 sleep mode, the data remains intact. The Read Only error does not cause any data loss though it's still very annoying.

I'm going to go through all AHCI driver versions I currently have (about five different builds from 2005 until 2007). There's also one version, the most recent one, that I have not yet tested due to Asus keeping ancient driver versions on their download pages. I'm currently looking through the support pages of DFI, MSI, Giigabyte etc. to try and find this most recent SB600 AHCI driver.
 
I think I fixed the Read Only problem.

I tried all the drivers I could find: 2.5.1540.35 and .39 (latest Asus driver I believe) both fail as does 3.1.1540.11 (SB7xx driver). Version 2.5.1540.43, which for some reason is the latest SB600 driver available at AMD's own homepage also fails. I did not try 3.1.1540.50 which is the latest SB7xx driver, since it's not really meant for my SB600 southbridge.

However build 2.5.1540.48 available from the MSI K9A2 download page seem to work. After having installed them, neither drive has shown as up Read Only so far while they would usually write protect themselves almost immediately after bootup. I guess I'll just have to keep using the computer and see if the errors come back or if the problem fixed itself. The only drawback with all driver above version .35 is that they introduce a slight idle pause during Windows startup, which is why I've always used .35 with my Vista 32-bit setup. But I can live with that pause, I suppose.

This means that after many days of hard work, the core OS is finally in a usable state. Now I can actually try to install a few games and apps and see how they work. Never had the time to try that many before due to the many problems I encountered. I'll keep my 32-bit Vista image for another several of days - if any game or program acts up I'm putting that back on the drive :)
 
Good luck dude. I think what Zinn said is spot on. A little late, but if you can get 64-bit working without too much hassle, go for it, but if you have to spend time dealing with it due to dodgy hardware, is it really worth the hassle? :)
 
General Crespin said:
Good luck dude. I think what Zinn said is spot on. A little late, but if you can get 64-bit working without too much hassle, go for it, but if you have to spend time dealing with it due to dodgy hardware, is it really worth the hassle? :)
Click to expand...

Well it does give me more ram for Superfetch, it will usually cache 3.3+ GB in Vista x64 but only less than 2.5 GB in Vista 32-bit. Doubt it make that much of a difference, though.

The other issue was that with 32-bit Vista and Oblivion plus the QTP3 texture pack and enhanced cities, I got what appeared to be paging to disk at the Anvil harbor. It might of course also be the Oblivion game engine itself that has trouble managing the amount of data. Once I get Oblivion and mods reinstalled I'll find out.

Finally the extra RAM means I can use more RAM for virtual machines.

Had I known what a hassle it would be to upgrade, I would have stuck with 32-bit for sure.. but I don't like giving up :) Now that the OS seems to be up and running without issues, I'll stick with it unless I find a reason to go back - one more weird issue like that and I'm going back to 32-bit.
 
I have been using 64 bit for about a 1.5 years now and the only bug that i have found on my system is it also will read only one of my data drives. This is a partition in raid 1 and the other partition is never effected. A simple reboot always fixes the problem and I have found the sleep function to be rock solid so I only reboot every couple weeks on average so it is really a non issue for me.

Other then that an overclocked core 2 and 4 gigs runs fantastically for me. Way better then xp ever did.
 
I had problems with SLI/X-Fi/4GB RAM, but that was a problem unique to the aforementioned combination and memory mapping problems. Basically, if you limited the machine to about 3.5GB RAM the computer would run fine, but if you left it alone either you'd get no video with perfect audio or video with a horrible screeching coming out of the speakers. It was very annoying. 64-bit is still new-ish compared to other technologies; put that on top of an operating system with a different driver model and you have a recipe for problems.

I sincerely hope you can tough it out; I did and since NVIDIA/Creative fixed their drivers, I've run 4GB and now 8GB of RAM with Ultimate x64. It's really worth it...
 
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