Vista 64 on old P4 Machine?

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Gary1951

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May 9, 2007
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I"m curently running XP SP3 on my P4 3.2 with 4 gig of ram. Of course as you all know it only reconigizes 3.58 or so. I was wondering how it would run with Vista Ultimate 64. I do not game on this machine anymore. Do Internet, Email and Photography stuff on it. I run Olympus Studio2, Olympus Master and Adobe Photo Elements 6. Any sugestions and advice would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.:confused:
 
The Netburst P4/Xeon chips actually ran slower in 64-bit Operating Systems than they did in 32-bit. You'd get the rest of your RAM but would take a performance hit on the processor. I wouldn't do it.
 
I don't have a P4 but my CPU is from around the same era. I have Vista x64 running on an AMD Opteron 165 (1.8Ghz) with 4 Megs of DDR. It's plenty fast as far as I can tell. Sure, it won't break any benchmark speed records, but it's no slouch either, it's quite snappy and responsive. It mostly runs Photoshop, Dreamweaver, web/email, with the occasional DVD burning and movie watching, and it even handles most games with no problems (though that's mostly because of my video card). So I think you should be OK.
 
If you've got one of the CPUs listed on this page (the P4's that have EM64T support) then you're good to go:

http://www.intel.com/products/processor_number/chart/pentium4.htm

Looks like you may have the 541 or the 640 as those are the two that run at 3.2 GHz natively, so I'll bet you wouldn't have issues at all. The single core aspect will be a bit of a damper on overall performance but it should work fine as you've got 4GB of RAM.

A Pentium D would be far better but that could require a new mobo entirely - if you're using a 541 or a 640, the specs say those are Socket 775 processors so, you could be in luck because Pentium D's are Socket 775 also. See if your mobo supports a Pentium D and perhaps that would give you an upgrade path for better performance, better multitasking because of the dual cores, and a smoother running system overall.

But yes, if your Pentium 4 supports EM64T then get rolling on the 64 bit bandwagon. You'll have a more responsive system and a slight performance bump even when using only 32 bit software, and you'd then have the option for 64 bit computing too. Cool stuff... :D

Good luck...
 
Joe Average said:
If you've got one of the CPUs listed on this page (the P4's that have EM64T support) then you're good to go:

http://www.intel.com/products/processor_number/chart/pentium4.htm

Looks like you may have the 541 or the 640 as those are the two that run at 3.2 GHz natively, so I'll bet you wouldn't have issues at all. The single core aspect will be a bit of a damper on overall performance but it should work fine as you've got 4GB of RAM.

A Pentium D would be far better but that could require a new mobo entirely - if you're using a 541 or a 640, the specs say those are Socket 775 processors so, you could be in luck because Pentium D's are Socket 775 also. See if your mobo supports a Pentium D and perhaps that would give you an upgrade path for better performance, better multitasking because of the dual cores, and a smoother running system overall.

But yes, if your Pentium 4 supports EM64T then get rolling on the 64 bit bandwagon. You'll have a more responsive system and a slight performance bump even when using only 32 bit software, and you'd then have the option for 64 bit computing too. Cool stuff... :D

Good luck...
Click to expand...

There's also the

Pentium 4 3.2 (Northwood) socket 478,
Pentium 4 3.2E (Prescott) socket 478
Pentium 4 540 (Prescott) socket 775
Pentium 4 540J (Prescott) socket 775

None of those supported 64-bit.
 
Download this program, unzip it and run it.

Look in the "Instructions" row on the CPU tab. If you don't see anything labeled as 'EM64T' or 'x86-64' then your processor is not 64-bit compatible, therefore Vista 64 will not run on your computer.
 
Assuming your processor has EM64T support 64-bit Vista will run fine.

Why'd you buy a P4 when you could have gone with a nice socket 939 Athlon 64 system back then? :p
 
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