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64-bit Windows XP Tested And Reviewed

Posted by timothy on from the more-bitness dept.

sebFlyte writes "64-bit Windows is nearly here, despite Microsoft quietly dropping support (and plans for it) for the Itanium on XP ... Windows XP for x64 RC1 has been tested, seemingly fairly thoroughly, and actually looks like a stable OS."

13 of 426 comments (clear)

  1. Windows Longhorn by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    Does anyone know if 64-bit will be present in Windows Longhorn in the upcoming future?

  2. Alpha by Zule_Boy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Seems kind of funny after the whole NT on Alpha death microsoft induced. Now this should be the final blow (thankfully) for the UnObtanium.

    1. Re:Alpha by TheNetAvenger · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Given that SPARC, POWER, PA-RISC, and MIPS are all still around, running Windows was never a pre-condition for survival. Alpha is like a foster child going from home to home eventually fizzling out and ending up in an addiction treatment shelter waiting out its last days hoping for a chance to die. Compaq, DEC, and HP just are bad parents, that's all.

      Ya, I agree, although the Alpha and Dec relationship to NT was more contigent than a lot of other processors. Dec used NT to showcase the power of the Alpha CPU, even before it was released back in 1992, it was being demonstrated runnting NT at comdex that year.

      So Dec had pinned a lot of the success on it relationship with NT.

      But it wasn't the loss of NT that killed the Alpha, everyone knew that Compaq had no interest in keeping the Alpha project alive when they aquired DEC, in some ways we pretty much knew they wanted to off the Alpha, as it was competing against Compaq servers of the time.

      Compaq not only cut the Alpha support off at the throat, they directly nailed the project the first chance they had.

  3. Windose... by ThisNukes4u · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is supposed to be a professional news site, can we just spell it as it is for once, and bash in the comments instead of the supposedly "objective" blurb?

    --
    thisnukes4u.net
  4. Already a veteran WinXP64 user by Zedrick · · Score: 2, Insightful
    I've used the 64-bit version since March or April something. Build 1069 had it's fair share of problems, but I've been running build 1218 for a while now, and it isn't much different from normal XP.

    All hardware except for an old USB webcam works fine with the built in drivers (but I ofcourse downloaded and installed 64bit drivers from Nvidia for my FX5600). I use it quite a lot for gaming and remote access to manage porn-downloads from work (dualbooting FreeBSD for useful stuff). All in all, works fine.

  5. Typo in article? by kschawel · · Score: 3, Insightful

    With the 32-bit version the maximum is 4GB, while systems running the 64-bit version will have as much as 32GB

    Isn't it supposed to be 16TB not 32GB? Just look at the table. Maybe it is referring to something else...

  6. final sentence. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Then perhaps Intel will finally jump up on the 64-bit-bandwagon that was set rolling by AMD and Microsoft.
     .. Yeah ! Right ! , Thanks to AMD and M$ for bringing us 64bit processors and operating systems. I thought it would never happen.

  7. Funny? by RMH101 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This isn't funny. It's sad. Deeply predictable, and very very sad indeed. This single post summarises what's crap about slashdot over the last couple of years. Pointless point scoring over content, intelligent discussion and debate. Fuck off.

  8. 64bits, fewer crashes... by jeif1k · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... and still nothing decent on.

    Seriously, the problem with Windows are ultimately its bloat, its user interface, its administrative tools, and its functionality. While making it more stable and porting it to a 64bit processor are nice, they don't fix what is fundamentally wrong with it.

    1. Re:64bits, fewer crashes... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      That's pretty funny. Bloat I can see, but the rest?

      Whose user interface are you comparing it to? Apple, maybe, sure. But that's about it. The majority of people with IQs over 80 have problems with Windows's user interface. Don't even try to tell me that anything in Linux is more intuitive.

      Administrative tools. Once again, in comparison to what? Linux? Sorry buddy, I like Linux, but running vi on files in /etc is hardly an easy-to-use tool. Sure, it's powerful the first time, but it's time consuming to consult the docs 6 months down the road when you need to change something and have forgotten each app's specific syntax. Windows's snap-in interface (with MMC) is pretty nice, I have to say.

      Functionality. Seriously, what are you missing that you need? No, seriously. Maybe you can make an argument on the server end... _maybe_. But on the desktop, it's hard to argue that Windows has anything but the best in functionality simply because there are so many 3rd party developers. Yes, you can do all sorts of weird and crazy QoS with the Linux kernel, but that's a pretty niche feature.

      You're just FUDing. Windows isn't the best tool for everything, but to write off its user interface, administrative tools, and functionality is ridiculous. Those are its strengths, not its weaknesses.

  9. the power of commercial software development by geg81 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Microsoft manages to deliver a beta of a 64bit version of Windows only, what, several years later than Linux. And while the 64bit Linux distributions come with most applications actually recompiled as 64bits, you will hardly get any 64bit applications for Windows.

  10. Re:WinXP x64 on Xeon machine by sirReal.83. · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Between the dual-1.8GHz-opteron and the dual-3.4GHz-em64t machines that I use on a regular basis at work, I'd pick the AMD any day - the speed might be equalish but the Intel box produces several times the level of noise and heat.

  11. 16-bit programs do not run by wintermute1974 · · Score: 2, Insightful
    From the article:
    Anyone who still uses older 16-bit programs can forget about running them under 64-bit Windows. However, some 32-bit applications use 16-bit code during installation, which means that these programs cannot be installed.
    Well, this is disappointing. For the first time ever Microsoft is dropping support for binaries that ran in earlier versions of Windows.

    Does Microsoft no longer value older software? Do they presuppose that users no longer want backward compatibility?

    Is it too hard to extend the NT Virtual DOS Machine to the 64-bit architecture? Or is the expectation that I only run the new, 64-bit, XP editions of Microsoft Spiffy from now on?

    Really, I thought Microsoft's big ace was the mountains of old, existing binaries that just worked without needing the source to recompile on their new OSes. Apparently this does not matter any more.