Vista x32 or Vista x64?

G

greyt_Autumn

Gawd
Joined
Oct 2, 2001
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Win 7 is not an option until a total new build (likely after I7 goes EOL no less- 5 year cycles for me) or another half price coupon comes along.

I'm reformatting (backing up is a royal pain) and I'm legal for either OS. this PC is mostly a gamer with some light video editing in Pinnacle Studio.

I've been running Vista x64 for a few years now and very happy, but if 'downgrading' to x32 will get me a bit better performance in Flight sims (I'm not really a shooter gamer- mostly fsx), Then I'll go that route.

Opinions are welcome,

Thanks
 
I read your post, but my answer is still Windows 7 x64. I won't recommend anything less to anyone at this point.
 
Get win 7, it is a option it runs faster than vista. It really does. my old comp is even beating the startup time of a xp system just because it had win 7 installed. My new comp using win 7 only takes like 1 min to be fully started. Before in vista it takes about 3 minutes.
 
Going to install windows 7 64 on the wives computer and compare it to my vista 64 set up. Their identicle boxes. Using her as a test subject before I make the jump lol. So far though after a year of Vista I don't see a need to switch. Than again ignorance is bliss :p
 
Wrench said:
Going to install windows 7 64 on the wives computer and compare it to my vista 64 set up. Their identicle boxes. Using her as a test subject before I make the jump lol. So far though after a year of Vista I don't see a need to switch. Than again ignorance is bliss :p
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you'll most likely want to switch to 7 after you see it on your wive's puter. I dual-boot Vista and Xp (both 32 ) but will move to windows 7 all together i believe
 
The only Win 7 I have access to is business (pro) with KMS licensing. Not of much use at home :( I'm not setting up a KMS server at home. nor will I have enough licenses to activate there!

Of course it is legit.... Maybe I'll try it to kick it around for a while. I wonder how teh licensing will work out as we are really just beginning to think about evaluating it.

Yes I'm in IT here. Maybe my MS rep.... (LOL!)

I can't say that I have ever been unhappy with Vista x64. I got on board right at the SP1 release- which should have been the RC IMHO.
 
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If you already have a vista x64 license it is certainly still a great option.
 
greyt_Autumn said:
The only Win 7 I have access to is business (pro) with KMS licensing. Not of much use at home :( I'm not setting up a KMS server at home. nor will I have enough licenses to activate there!

Of course it is legit.... Maybe I'll try it to kick it around for a while. I wonder how teh licensing will work out as we are really just beginning to think about evaluating it.

Yes I'm in IT here. Maybe my MS rep.... (LOL!)

I can't say that I have ever been unhappy with Vista x64. I got on board right at the SP1 release- which should have been the RC IMHO.
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Vista 64 is a solid operating system, it's just that Windows 7 is better. If your only choice is between Vista 32 and 64, go with 64. If Windows 7 is a possibility, then go with Windows 7 64.
 
Another vote for Vista 64 but as with everyone else, Win 7 x64 would be even better.
 
If sticking with Vista, make sure its Pro x64, Might have support for your flight sims and x64 executable.

And games that use x64 like crysis and lost planet and such will be able to run better.

As for windows 7, I'm using Pro x64 RTM and loving it. I used Vista Post SP1 and can't really complain, but now tweaking out windows 7, it takes no time to boot into windows from the welcome screen, it flashes for a second and right into the desktop! I'm still working on shutdown tweaks though :( XP still wins on the shutdown, used to only take me about 3-5 seconds to shutdown.
 
All of the game I play have 32 bit exe's. (unfortunately) But it seems that there are 2 things right now in game software development that have not 'arrived' so much- true multithreading and x64 apps, except for enterprise stuff (Exchange, SQL and the like).

I'ts no issue to reinstall Vista X64. Got the media in my home office, and the only Win 7 is a KMS version from work that I can try, it's just the licensing issue as we don't have a KMS server running now, nor do we have enough installs to justify even the 25 that the program calls for. We just received authorization for a Vm project with VMWare, so I'll have 3 Vm clusters by January or so. That's a game changer and a lot to learn.

I was unable to get in on the Half price program, and the 'offical' release isn't for a few weeks yet. I do have it running in a hyper-V vm here though along with a server 2008 R2 domain, my next project here at work after VMWare- Stand up a 2008 infrastructure to replace all of our DC's, then Excahgne, and all of the back end servers that we can upgrade to 2008....

Sounds like I'm going back to Vista X64- jut based on licensing for now.
 
Same as what everyone else said already. If there is ANY way at all to get a copy of 7, do it.

Otherwise, go for vista 64. Still a solid system, and not nearly as bad as people make it out to be. (I don't think people really remember the garbage that was ME)
 
windows x64 x32 is a dead horse and I am kinda pissed that MS even thought about releasing windows x32 as it will delay x32's death
 
Windows 7

I've found 32 bit Vista somehow more zippy, I have both versions with Ultimate
 
Vista 64 isn't that bad when you strip it down. I have mine stripped of all the crap I will never use or don't need protection from. 7 is likely still faster in gaming, but in day to day use on a decent machine Vista runs about as fast as noticeably possible... when correctly tweaked.
 
Jakalwarrior said:
Vista 64 isn't that bad when you strip it down. I have mine stripped of all the crap I will never use or don't need protection from. 7 is likely still faster in gaming, but in day to day use on a decent machine Vista runs about as fast as noticeably possible... when correctly tweaked.
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Yes, but why go through the trouble of tweaking Vista when you get W7 working better out of the box?
 
If you have more than 3GB of memory, you need x64 to use it all. 32-bit is for the 3-and-under crowd. Otherwise, there's no functional difference, and driver support is pretty good for both nowadays, now that companies have had almost 5 years (going back to WinXP x64) to get 64-bit drivers shipped.

I'll leave the Win7/Vista in-fighting to others; I've already moved to Win7 gold thanks to MSDN at work. But if you already have Vista x64 and you're happy living with it (I'd not want to, but it's up to you ultimately) and have 3+ GB of memory, that's the route to go.

Note: all of this is null if you have 16-bit apps. They won't run in 64-bit Windows without virtualization with a 32-bit OS. But for gaming/general usage performance is basically identical and you can't visually tellt hem apart without using the system properties page.
 
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DeerSteak said:
If you have more than 3GB of memory, you need x64 to use it all. 32-bit is for the 3-and-under crowd. Otherwise, there's no functional difference, and driver support is pretty good for both nowadays, now that companies have had almost 5 years (going back to WinXP x64) to get 64-bit drivers shipped.
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You are off base about needing 64bit Windows to use more than 3GB of RAM. Again memory mapping or memory remapping is different on each system and the relationship between devices that have thier own RAM and how much system RAM is lost during remapping is not a 1:1 ratio. Even when you have less than 4GB of RAM Windows 7 x64 works just fine. Really there is no reason to go with the 32bit version unless you need to run 16bit software natively and you don't want to use the XP mode virtual machine to do it. 64bit Windows is functionally no different than 32bit Windows and performs about the same. You don't have the driver or compatibility problems that used to plague the 64bit OSes and WOW32 may use slightly more RAM than you'd need to natively run some 32bit applications but the difference doesn't yield any performance differences that are even worth mentioning. My girlfriend's machine only has 2GB of RAM and it's running Windows 7 64bit. It runs better like that than it did running Windows Vista 32bit. I've also never run into any problems with applications and memory usage isn't unusually high or anything. Granted she would need more RAM for some applications but that's true of any program that can leverage more than 2GB of RAM. Even Batman Arkham Asylum (which recommends 3GB of RAM) run flawlessly on her machine despite having less than the recommended amount of RAM. Windows 7 isn't like Vista 32bit vs. 64bit. It runs about the same and the memory usage us similar. The only two functional differences are that Windows 7 x64 can address more RAM than Windows 7 32bit can and 16bit software won't run in Windows 7 64bit at all.

That shouldn't be a problem for most people and even if it was, 95% or more of those issues can be resolved by using Windows XP Mode.
 
Do not use Vista. Do whatever you need to get a Win 7 license, but do not get Vista. This isnt the usual MS bashing, its just that VISTA is a vastly inferior product that even MS has acknowledged.
 
Krenum said:
Yes, but why go through the trouble of tweaking Vista when you get W7 working better out of the box?
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Maybe so. Maybe he is a doctor or CEO and his 30 minutes of tweak time is worth more than the 100-200 dollar purchase price of windows 7.

Guys he said he already owns Vista. Windows 7 may indeed be better but for anyone already owning vista, I bet the same money spent on your hardware would have WAY more impact.
 
x64 :)

While I like windows 7 more than vista, it's still not a bad choice of an OS (vista that is). You can feel confident going to it. The main thing is leaving 32bit in the past where it belongs :p
 
mmarsh said:
Do not use Vista. Do whatever you need to get a Win 7 license, but do not get Vista. This isnt the usual MS bashing, its just that VISTA is a vastly inferior product that even MS has acknowledged.
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This *is* the usual MS bashing. If you sat down with a copy of Vista you would see that it isn't nearly as bad as people have made it out to be. It runs, and runs pretty well. It is a little bloated and can be a little slow if you don't have it configured properly - but it is stable and works.

People rant on about how it is like Windows ME - but after SP1 Vista runs on almost every system without a problem. ME would eat partitions while it was doing a "disk check", it would randomly crash (about on par with 3.1 - if any of you can remember that far back), and was full of security holes and memory leaks. Vista on the other hand can run for days or even weeks without having to be even rebooted.

Really, 7 is good. It addresses some of the UI issues with vista, and refines UAC to the point where people probably won't need to disable it. But Vista is really ok to use, and won't really hinder you from getting work done.
 
IdiotCow said:
This *is* the usual MS bashing. If you sat down with a copy of Vista you would see that it isn't nearly as bad as people have made it out to be. It runs, and runs pretty well. It is a little bloated and can be a little slow if you don't have it configured properly - but it is stable and works.

People rant on about how it is like Windows ME - but after SP1 Vista runs on almost every system without a problem. ME would eat partitions while it was doing a "disk check", it would randomly crash (about on par with 3.1 - if any of you can remember that far back), and was full of security holes and memory leaks. Vista on the other hand can run for days or even weeks without having to be even rebooted.

Really, 7 is good. It addresses some of the UI issues with vista, and refines UAC to the point where people probably won't need to disable it. But Vista is really ok to use, and won't really hinder you from getting work done.
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I couldn't agree more. Vista wasn't all that bad. Windows 7 is really similar, it's just done better so why bother with Vista at this point?
 
YeuEmMaiMai said:
please remove your head from your ass, you might actually see better........ windows 7 is built upon vista.......lol DUH......
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Didn't your mother teach you better? Keep your dumbass comments to yourself.
 
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64-bit. Welcome to 2007.


mmarsh said:
Do not use Vista. Do whatever you need to get a Win 7 license, but do not get Vista. This isnt the usual MS bashing, its just that VISTA is a vastly inferior product that even MS has acknowledged.
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This person has clearly never used Vista (or is just ignorant), otherwise they would know it's a very solid OS. Of course if you had to choose, Windows 7 would be the answer. But sticking with Vista (since you already have it) is not bad.
 
FYI- I installed Win 7 x64 last night and did some very basic s/w installs. Haven;t en played with it much more than window shake and installing the latest ATI drivers :)

WE'll see how licensing plays out, but I'm currently 'genuine' without a key. (I do have a key form work- but it's KMS and I need a MAK or standalone key)
 
I'm legit- entered my key and it shows one license in use :) Awesome.


Maybe I'll actually get to PLAYING on my PC this weekend. I doubt it somehow. I get to be Dad all weekend to a 2 year old while my wife works.
 
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