Out of curiosity, have any of you guys made the leap to a 64-bit operating system?

I'm planning on making the God-forsaken switch to Vista sometime next year so I can start working on my MCSE 2008 cert, and I think it might be a good time to transition to a native 64-bit operating system.

From what I've been reading, most manufacturers have finally released relatively stable 64-bit drivers, and Microsoft has correct the most egregious flaws with their 64-bit Vista implementation.

Briney, are any of your employer's toys running a 64-bit OS?

-b0b
(...wants to know if anyone has moved to the "dark side.")

I know you're running an oddball virtual install on a Macintrash, but have you run into any driver issues?  Have you noticed the infamous sound glitching that Vista is known for?

The first thing I'm going to do is disable the UAC "feature" in Vista.  That bugged the crap out of me in Vista RC2.

-b0b
(...foams at the mouth.)

Does UAC annoy the crap out of you, or is it just me?



-b0b
(...disabled it after the 4,316th warning.)

Why not disable it?

How many people do you let use your computer?

I don't let anyone, that's why I invested in a trunk monkey to protect it.

UAC is completely and utterly pointless in a properly-administrated Active Directory domain.  If the PC is a member workstation in an AD domain administrated by somebody with half a brain, there is absolutely no reason to leave UAC enabled.

On a typical standalone home PC run by Ma and Pa Retard, then yes, UAC might prevent some malicious behavior from third parties.  That being said, Microsoft should have learned long ago that annoying pop-up warnings will simply be ignored by the average user.  After seeing a warning message for the thousandth time, they'll just click OK without even reading the message.  Can you blame them?  If clicking OK was the right choice the first 999 times, why would it be wrong the 1,000th time?

UAC also has a habit of popping up at the most inconvenient times.  Have you tried to play a network game under Vista yet?  Whenever the game calls on a secondary application for connectivity (for voice chat, server hosting, Internet game searches, etc.), UAC pops up a warning.  Do you know how annoying it is to have an application pop up in the middle of your game to warn you about completely safe activity?  Depending on what you're playing, your game will either minimize, lock up temporarily, or just crash entirely.  Thanks, Microsoft!

-b0b
(...LAME!)

I'm pretty sure there is a Windows XP Pro 64 bit version.

Stick wrote on Nov 30^th, 2007 at 12:21pm:


There are two of them, actually.  The first was designed for i64 Itanium Itanic platforms and is no longer supported.  The newer version is for x64 (AMD/Intel) platforms.

From what I've heard, driver and application support for XP 64 is really scarce, even more so than Vista 64.  Moreover, there is no real reason for me to install a 64-bit OS if I stick with XP.

Depending on my finances in February when I build my new system, I might just stick with good ol' 32-bit XP for a couple months until I can afford my new drive array and a copy of Vista Ultimate 64.  That should give the platform a few more months to incubate before I make the plunge.

-b0b
(...can't wait until he can get his hands on a GeForce 9000 series card!)

Well, I installed the 32-bit version of Vista last night.  I popped the new 500GB hard drive and 550w PSU into my existing rig and removed the RAID adapter, four 80GB SATA drives, the 431w PSU, and four pounds of dust.

After fighting like crazy for two hours to get my old Via KT880 motherboard to recognize the new SATA3 hard drive, I eventually had to give up and move the drive to the onboard ALi SATA RAID ports.  These are slower than the other two ports because they use a secondary chip instead of the KT880 Southbridge, but the difference seems to be negligible.  The Via KT880 just won't recognize the SATA3 drive, even when I use a jumper to force the drive into SATA1.5 compatibility mode.

I installed Vista Ultimate 32-bit so I could get an idea of how it runs on my old system before upgrading in February.  For what its worth, Vista itself seems to run fairly well.  I haven't installed any applications or games yet so I can't really comment on the difference in performance, but so far everything seems to be running smoothly.

I haven't tried out Windows Aero, Flip 3D, or BitLocker yet, so I'll comment on those later.  I'm really curious to see how big of an impact Aero and Flip3D have on system performance.

I did have a chance to play with ReadyBoost, though, and I have to say that it's a really cool technology.  ReadyBoost uses cheap USB flash drives as a form of secondary RAM.  Since flash drives have much higher access speeds than hard drives, ReadyBoost can cache files into a USB flash drive once RAM is full.  This results in faster application responsiveness.

I've got a brand spankin' new 4GB SDHC card that came with a USB flash drive that I bought for the Wii and my DVD player.  Of course, after I bought it, I found out that neither system supports SDHC, only the older SD standard.  ReadyBoost, here we come!



I've got a slightly different model with an annoying flashing blue LED that is brighter than the sun, but this is a pretty close match.



Once you insert the drive, you can select the ReadyBoost tab in the drive properties to turn the feature on and select how much space on the drive you want to dedicate.  This screenshot is stolen from some random website, but I've dedicated the entire 4GB to ReadyBoost.  I'll run some benchmarks with and without ReadyBoost later on to see how much it really helps.

I do have a few complaints, though.  First, Vista seems to thrash my processor like crazy.  I realize that my Athlon XP 3000+ is nowhere near the fastest processor on the market these days, but there's really no reason why an operating system with no applications running should be using 100% of a 2.164GHz processor.  It doesn't seem to be killing my system performance, though, so I'll have to wait and see how it affects applications and games.

On the other hand, Vista doesn't seem to be nearly as big a memory hog as most people complain about.  Again, I'll see if this changes once I enable Aero and Flip 3D.

Disk Defragmenter has been completely overhauled, and I can see both pros and cons with the new program.  On one hand, scheduling automatic defrags is much easier and can be done within the program, instead of using Task Scheduler.  On the other hand, you can no longer pull up a report of fragmentation before or after the scan, and you have no visual indicator of the progress of an ongoing scan.  That really blows, because you've got no idea how much of a scan has been completed!

As I suspected, UAC is still extraordinarily annoying.  I disabled it almost immediately.  Every time you try to do anything, I had to confirm it with UAC.  Delete an item off the start menu?  UAC!  Change your display properties?  UAC!  Defragment your hard drive?  UAC!  Please, tell me why it's necessary to use UAC to confirm a defragmentation?  Is Microsoft worried that some violent hacker is going to maliciously defragment everybody's hard drives?

-b0b
(...will definitely post more as he thinks of it.)

It's essentially a faster virtual cache/RAM.  Once your system hits the RAM limit, the OS starts paging out to L4 cache, which is usually the paging file on the hard drive.  With ReadyBoost, the faster USB drive becomes the L4 cache, and the hard drive page file becomes L5 cache.

• L1 Cache - On processor, runs at the core speed of the CPU.
• L2 Cache - On die, runs at the speed of the FSB.
• L3 Cache - RAM, runs at the speed of the bus, but with much higher latency.
• L4 Cache - ReadyBoost, runs at USB 2.0 bus speed (480Mbps).
• L5 Cache - Hard drive paging file, runs at the drive's transfer speed.

-b0b
(...the more you know.)

You wrote -bob twice, that counts as a mistake.  Me finding this thus gives me a point.


...so what is it now 1500 to 3?  I am going to catch you soon!

I finished getting the OS setup last night and I've reinstalled most of my applications.  I might be able to get some gaming done on Saturday, so I'll let you know how they play.

I tried out Aero and Flip 3D last night, and wasn't incredibly impressed by either.  I've gone back to the classic interface and classic start menu.  Windows 2000 never looked so good!

By the way, I haven't run into any driver issues.  The only piece of hardware I have that doesn't work is my craptastic flatbed scanner.  I bought it at Meijer about six years ago and the vendor doesn't even have a website, so I'm going to have to call it a loss.  I hardly use it anyway so it isn't a big deal.

-b0b
(...is downloading Half-Life 2 from Steam to try out tonight.)

My friend at work just built his new rig and installed 64bit XP pro.  He said that he found all of his drivers just fine and everything is peachy.

He got a quad core Q6600, that's the cheapest one. Its paired with a 8800GTX.  He overclocked the system where the CPU is now running at 3.3GHz and its normally at 2.4.  His cooling is a high end Zalman fan heatsink.

Yea, he did.  He gave me some numbers but I can't recall them off the top of my head.  I will ask him tomorrow.

He's playing crysis and said he noticed a small lag spike once when he was in major combat but that is all.

warhammer 40k was cool for a while but you have to play the same tactical way everytime or you will lose.  Kinda got boring....

Because like you and I've always said...

The 'X' means better!

X

Stick wrote on Dec 10^th, 2007 at 3:25pm:


I never felt that way with the Dark Crusade expansion.  Considering the expansion brought the total playable faction list up to seven (which is crazy for an RTS) and expanded the existing factions with new units and upgrades, I never played two games that were exactly alike.  I'm not even sure it'd be reasonably possible.

Of course, I tend to be a bit of a "turtle" when it comes to strategy games, whether they are turn based or real time.  I like to hole up in some forgotten corner of the map, create a massive defensive grid, and pour all of my time and resources into research.  Only when I've got the biggest and baddest units available do I start creating my Legion of Doom™.

The thing I like about Dawn of War and its sequels is the quick game play.  Even though I still tend to play defensively, it's impossible to really turtle in that game because your defensive options are limited and your opponents can field decent units very quickly.  In my experience, it's fairly rare that a multiplayer game against human opponents lasts more than an hour.

On another note, have you seen the new expansion that is in production?  After nearly four years, the third expansion is really starting to take shape.  Soulstorm will build on the campaign engine that was included in Dark Crusade, and will introduce two more races, the Dark Eldar and the Sisters of Battle.  The game will also (finally!) bring in airborne units, which should really make for some interesting battles.

You can read more here:

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/warhammer40000dawnofwarsoulstorm/news.html?s...

-b0b
(...is thinking about breaking out Dark Crusade when he gets home.)

Wow, that's pretty impressive.  Thanks for tracking down the numbers for me.  It's reassuring to know that I've picked out decent hardware.  How am I going to wait until March...

By the way, I played Dark Crusade when I got home last night and really enjoyed it.  I don't know how I skipped it!  The Necrons are darn near unstoppable once they get a couple Strategic Locations.

-b0b
(...would love to play some multiplayer one of these days.)

Stick wrote on Dec 12^th, 2007 at 10:48am:


Yeah, I'm actually thinking about buying an 8800GT and upgrading to a 9000 series GTX-equivalent later in the year when they drop down in price a bit (as they inevitably will).

I tend to do more RAM-intensive tasks than CPU-intensive tasks, so the Q6600 should be fine for me.  If there is a significant price drop in the next three months, I may go with the Q6850 instead.


Quote:


Fantastic!  Once you get a new rig, we should be able to play some of the newer games that have hit the market.  Without a doubt, Unreal Tournament III is going to be on that list!


Quote:


Congratulations!  Do you have a job lined up already, or are you going to be looking for something?

-b0b
(...yeah!)

I typically only do a 10-15% overclock because I expect my equipment to last at least 2-3 years.  It never hurts to harness a little bit of untapped power, though.   

I've read about EVGA's Step-Up program before, but I've heard a lot of questionable comments about their stock availability.  Besides, they don't cross-ship, so I'd have to send out my video card and wait for them to receive it before they shipped out the new one.  I'd probably be without a video card for at least a week, and that's not really an option. 

Since I built the Bobulator IV in summer 2001, I don't think it or its successors have ever been powered down for more than three consecutive hours.  Even when moving to a new place, the Bobulator is the last device to be powered down when leaving and the first device to be powered back up upon arrival.

-b0b
(...needs his computer!)

Call of Duty 4 is looking pretty sweet.  I wasn't a huge fan of Battlefield 2, but I'll definitely give CoD4 a try.  Don't get me wrong, BF2 was an excellent game, but it wasn't really my style.

Dual monitors, eh?  I wish I still had a crazy computer budget for stuff like that!  I'm sure those days will return... after the kids go off to college.   

-b0b
(...wowza.)

Spanky,  what all did you put into your new rig?  You're running a Q6600 and an 8800GT, right?  What else did you pop in there?

-b0b
(...bets it is drool worthy.)

Well, 3DMark usually has some crappy little game built into it, so technically you could play 3DMark.

I had a hard time choosing between the nForce 680i chipset and the new Intel X38 chipset.  In my humble experience, nVidia's chipsets have always been crap, but they won't license SLI to anybody else so you're stuck with their crappy chipset if you want to run SLI.

I finally decided to go with the X38 chipset from Intel because of their performance and reliability gains over the 680i.  I'm too poor to pay for two graphics cards, and I'd rather just have one constantly updated top-end card than two mid-range cards that I could only replace every few years.

SLI just doesn't make any sense unless you've got money to burn.  The performance gains are tiny (10-20% usually) and not worth the extra cost, heat, or power consumption.

-b0b
(...would admittedly buy an SLI rig if he was a bajillionaire.)

if you want to sell it let me know. which version of 360 is it?

I told you Wii was awesome!  You should definitely pick up Mario Strikers: Charged because it rocks your weak world.

Although Meredith and I love the Wii, I'm really starting to crave non-cutesy, non-party games.  The Wii is really lacking on that point.

Meredith has been hinting at wanting Katamari and DDR, so I bought her an XBox 360 Elite for Christmas with both of those games.  Shh, don't tell her!

I might pick up Mass Effect and Assassin's Creed for it eventually.  I prefer to play my FPS games on the PC (and all other games, for that matter) but those two look pretty sweet.  Blue Dragon is also supposed to be an excellent game, and probably the only decent XBox RPG.

-b0b
(...wonders what other games he should get?)

I will be picking up Orange Box - for the PC.  Anybody that buys Half-Life 2 for the XBox 360 while owning a decent PC is a Stalin-worshiping pinko communist.

I already own the Valve überpack from the Steam/Half-Life 2 release (remember the cool hat?) with all of the Half-Life mods, Half-Life 2, all of the CounterStrike mods and CounterStrike: Source, and Day of Defeat: Source.  I want to get both Half-Life 2 expansions, Team Fortress 2, and Portal so I'll probably buy the Orange Box at an after-Christmas sale.

-b0b
(...w00t.)

......

And I'm spent!


X
(ahhhhh)

Whatever happened to the Quad SLI solution nVidia released with Dell back in the day?  For what its worth, this is probably a last minute gimmick to keep up with ATI's Crossfire solution, which is supposed to offer four-card coprocessing at some point (although it will probably suck as much as everything else ATI has produced over the past two years).

Did you read the system specs?  1100 watt power supply minimum.  That's sheer craziness!

I'm glad to see that the 3-way solution offers some actual improvement over a two-card rig, but its definitely limited to the higher resolutions.  Based on the performance of the older four-card SLI and 3/4-card Crossfire, I really wasn't hoping for much. 

That said, the games were only truly improved by three-way SLI when the resolution was cranked to ridiculous levels (2560x1600), and how many people do you know that own a 30" monitor?  By the time 30" LCD's even start to make it into high-end gaming circles, the 8800 Ultra will have long since been replaced by the GeForce 9000 (or even 10000) series.

Some of the benchmarks seem to point out that nVidia still needs to do some work on their drivers, which is to be expected.  In Quake Wars, for instance, two 8800GTX's outperformed three 8800Ultras.  If I had just dropped $2,000+ on three top-end video cards, I'd be pretty upset if some punk with two mid-range video cards had a higher frame rate than me.

-b0b
(...will laugh if one 9000-series card outperforms all three 8800Ultras.)

Actually, Stick, that's one of the big reason why I chose to get the XBox 360 for Meredith instead of a PS3.  I really want to stream content from my PC and server to our TV screen.  Meredith really wants to watch One Piece (an anime), but sitting around my green-tinted 19" monitor gets really old. 

Being able to stream video from Vista to the XBox will be excellent.  I just hope I don't have to re-encode everything to make it compatible.  Unfortunately, the new XVid and DivX implementations on the XBox 360 Dashboard don't support subtitles, so I won't be able to watch much of my anime...  Grr.

http://www.webtvwire.com/xbox-360-gets-divx-functionality-xbox-live-marketplace-...

For what its worth, nothing beats being able to watch Farting Preacher on the TV at a whim.

-b0b
(...score!)

Apparently, DivX and XVid only play through a separate dashboard option, not through the Windows Media Center extender.  Of course, I haven't played with it myself, so this is purely based on third-party reviews.  I'll be able to tell you more after Christmas.   

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/xbox-360-divx%5Cxvid-test/xbox-360-divxxvid-playback-...

-b0b
(...shrugs.)

Yeah, but who wants to buy an XBox and a mod chip and go through all of the trouble involved in soldering a billion tiny wires to the PCB?  If I was going to go through all that trouble, I'd just buy a laptop and a scan converter.

-b0b
(...already owns a scan converter, incidentally.)

Yeah, I've got an even better solution.  Get a long KVM-quality DVI cable and a scan converter and run a line from your PC to your monitor.  It doesn't get any easier than that...

...unless you've got an über-TV with a DVI hookup built-in, in which case you don't need the scan converter.

-b0b
(...points out that one of the managers at work has such a TV in his office.)

Yeah, but he is going to have a heart attack soon.  If you can make it into his will I say go for it.

computerjuvenile wrote on Dec 14^th, 2007 at 2:24pm:


It's been awhile since I've played with on-the-fly encoders, but it's been my experience that the videos played through them universally look like crap.  Not only is the image quality less than desirable, but there was a ton of lag and frame loss at random periods.

-b0b
(...may give it another try some day.)

Not sure, SLI only uses the extra processors, the memory data is copied and sent to all the cards.  So this would mean the CPU would have to send the same info to 3 adresses instead of 2 now.

Never know though, nvidea might pull out some trippy voodoo powers and make it work.

spanky wrote on Dec 14^th, 2007 at 3:46pm:


That sentence is amazingly ironic when you consider that nVidia bought their SLI technology from a company called Voodoo.

-b0b
(...had to point that out.)

This sounds like a very serious problem briney, let me help you out.  First I need you to take one of your monitors and wrap it in bubble wrap.  Then I need you to put it in a box and mail it to me.  That should solve the problem you are having with two monitors.

...worth a try.

Hey bob, what have you heard about XP SP3 vs Vista SP1?  For XP I have seen posts ranging from I want this to have my babies to it killed my dog.  Most people say they get a little better frame rates, but some games bsod.  But this is still beta, got any thoughts?


...also you can test the vista one.

Quote:



I think I pooped a little...

Quote:


Good job, AMD!  Thanks for dropping the ball!

AMD is so far behind the curve right now that Intel can not only delay their new products but jack up the prices on their existing products like crazy.  Have any of you priced out a QX9650 lately?  Holy mother of cheesecake...

-b0b
(...mmm, cheesecake!)