64-bit Windows XP Tested And Reviewed

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."

Comments

WinXP x64 on Xeon machine

[st3v]

I recently built a Dual Xeon (with EM64T extensions) machine, and I tried Windows XP x64, and it is running pretty well so far. It is backwards compatible with 32-bit applications, but you need to find 64-bit drivers for your hardware. 32-bit drivers will not work.

Re:WinXP x64 on Xeon machine

[ArbitraryConstant]

Isn't DMA broken on the Intel x86-64 chips, slowing things down?

Slower gaming...

[Frank of Earth]

http://reviews.zdnet.co.uk/software/os/0,39024180, 39183101-5,00.htm

Looks like you drop a few fps when running the 32bit games in a 64bit os. I wonder if new nvidia drivers would make it as fast or faster though...

Re:Don't know..

[Mike Rubits]

You and me both. I use it as a gaming OS too. Awesome once you trim down the server fat you don't really need on a desktop. It's XP without the bull, and hand-holding.

I've been using it...

[TexVex]

I recently upgraded to an Athlon64 3200+ and downloaded the Win64 eval/beta. There's practically no difference between it an Windows XP. I hvaen't had a single weird application incompatibility -- it's running all my 32-bit stuff just fine. I'm a gamer, so "32-bit apps" includes some hefty 3D-accellerated, DirectX-using stuff. I don't have any 64-bit apps to test with.

Hardware support required some initial digging to get drivers, but everything works fine.

In other words, if it weren't for the "64-Bit Edition" on the bootup screen and the Task Manager identifying 32-bit apps as such, I wouldn't really notice a difference between this and regular old WinXP.

Re:I've been using it...

[TexVex]

How was gaming performance on it?

I use an nVidia card and mobo chipset, and nVidia has been excellent for providing 64-bit drivers for their hardware. The WinXP-64 install had a driver for my graphics card (though I did go and download a newer one from nVidia after install). I'm not so hard core that I run my own benchmarks and tweak to get every last frame out of my system. For Doom 3 and for World of Warcraft, there hasn't been a noticeable drop in frame rate. If it is slower, it's not enough for my flesh-and-blood eyes to notice.

For reference, my old hardware was an Athlon 3200+. My new hardware is an Athlon64 3200+. The mobos are different. I'm using the same video card, RAM, sound card, etc..

Re:I've been using it...

[rsmith-mac]

I second the parent's assertion, it really is just like XP32. With RC1, Microsoft has finally turned off debugging and cleaned up the memory management code so that memory usage is more or less exactly in line with XP32(the previous Beta builds ate memory like Roseanne Barr at a buffet), and ZDNet has a good point about the driver stuff, since RC1 includes support for such new stuff as ATI's Radeon X-series cards right out of the box.

I really only have a handful of complaints at this point, and they're mostly F/OSS related actually. Cygwin has not been patched in any way to deal with XP64(which it needs to, as 32bit Cygwin and the 64bit CMD.exe do not get along), which is hindering other software ports since a lot of F/OSS stuff for Windows is built with Cygwin. My other issue is that the Java Standard Widget Toolkit(SWT) has not been ported to XP64(nor to the devs seem to have a plan to do so at the moment) which means no Eclipse or Azureus in spite of the whole write-once, run-anywhere Java mentality(and it's a shame, poor Sun actually has had a version of Java ready for XP64 for some time now). I also have a complaint of Microsoft: they didn't port Windows Media Player of all things to 64bit. 32bit WMP runs just fine, so it's not a problem, but the included software should all be 64bit, in my opinion.

Still, don't get me wrong, those are the biggest issues I have, and they're overall a .1 on a 1-10 scale of severity. As far as an architecture change goes, XP64 as it is right now is about as clean of a change as I could see happening. It's going to be a good OS, and I'm looking forward to having the chance to use some more 64bit software on it.

Dual Booting Linux & Windows in 64bit

[IcarusMoth]

I actually do this in both a classic and modern sense. Modernly Its Gentoo and XPx64-beta on the modern machine. I've only had it up and running since just 2 weeks prior to christmas, and have had no major hiccups so far. I have concerns about the speed and availibility of service packs and drivers (as in with such a small niche of customers having these processors will Microsoft, and more importantly 3rd party software and driver venders be as dilligent in keeping them updated, prior experience says no) Still It feels faster than having it run XPpro x32. AND it was free for the beta testing, SO, I've got like 340 more days of free OS action to keep me going.

In a Classic sense, right next to the AMD sits an Original, |D|I|G|I|T|A|L| Alpha thats currently running NT4 for Alpha and Gentoo (Though it started out with Red Hat). Running NT4Alpha is one of those things that you never forget. Its fast, stable and relatively virus proof but the biggest problem with it is the LACK OF APPLICATIONS. There were and are no third party apps compiled for NT4Alpha. this was such a major issue that |D|I|G|I|T|A|L| released an emulator thingie, but even that was too little too late to save it.

Thankfully, AMD decided to include Backwards compatibility on the die. because doing it at the higher level chalks up some major performance penalties. But lest we forget, liscensing Alpha technology is the reason we have a lot of the "innovations" boosting speed as of late *cough* Hyperthreading *cough*

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For great justice move sig

Not trolling but it did crash on me

[parryFromIndia]

I tried installing it on my R3240 Compaq laptop which has a Athlon64 processor - Installed fine on a external Maxtor USB drive, but when I boot it I get immediate BSOD.

Now the fact that it allowed me to install on a USB external drive is still impressive given the fact that FC3 does not even offer me to install it on USB drive.

But I don't think Microsoft is investing as much testing / development efforts in it compared to what it did during the release of Windows 2000 - which was the first stable kernel from Redmond.

Win XP 64-bits is a waste of your time and money

[dtjohnson]

Windows XP 64-bit edition has some major limitations. First, it uses a new driver model that means that all of the 32-bit drivers for your existing hardware will not work with the new Windows. Second, it has no support implemented for legacy 16-bit DOS or Windows apps which will therefore not run on it. The x86-64 cpus have support for running 16-bit software but Micrsoft chose not to enable it. These limitations don't exist for the 64-bit Linux versions. Microsoft ruled the 32-bit desktop but the 64-bit desktop should belong to Linux.

Re:Dual Booting Linux & Windows in 64bit

[Esben]

You are feeding the arguments for what I have been saying for years: Not only have the MS monopoly keeped the OS development back. It has also stifled the chip-development. All developers developed for MS-Intel. Nothing else. Most propetary software isn't portable. Therefore there was no applications for NT4 on Alpha. Therefore MS have given up on WindowsNT on PPC even though the OS might be easily portable in itself. Therefore all the superiour architectures to i386 has died.

If we are going to get new architectures - if it is not already too late - on the desktop we have to take either the route of open source, where each user (in principle) can recompile the application for his architecture, or the route of virtual machines (Java or .Net), which can do hotspot compilation locally. The distribution system of current properetary, closed source software, where precompiled binaries are distributed, kills every attempt to make an architecture which isn't compatible with the dominat i386 (maybe x64 in the future).

There is a good thing happening though: Intel and AMD seems to got stuck wrt. clock-speed. They can't make the CPUs run any faster now. They have to go for hypethreading or multi-core chips. For that to give any performance benifit most applications have to be rewritten. If while doing that people start to think about portability ther might be a chance that those rewritten applications will also run on other architectures. Even PC programmers aren't living in the near-assambler programming world as they did in the 80's and beginning of the 90s anymore!

XP64 = Good news for linux x86_64

[Klar]

I have 64 bit fedora core 3 installed on my laptop right now. The OS works great, but there is a big lack of wireless card drivers. Now with 32bit linux, you are able to run the windows wireless drivers using emulation in linux fine; however, since the windows drivers are 32 bit, you can't use them with a 64 bit os! XP64 should bring more 64 bit wireless drivers, which could be emulated in linux, thus allowing me to use wireless in linux, instead of having to boot to windows to get a wireless connection!

Re:Win XP 64-bits is a waste of your time and mone

[Anonymous Coward]

You're kidding, right? Who gives a flying fuck about 16-bit applications anymore? Sure, maybe if your company is running applications from 10 years ago, but if so, I doubt your company will be investing in 64-bit machines for all its staff any time soon.

And oh no, you have to get new drivers! Hint: in Linux, you also have to get new drivers when you upgrade to 64-bit; you're just lucky that you have the source available. In any case, who cares? Your motherboard manufacturer will certainly be supplying 64-bit drivers, and ATI, nVidia, and Creative Labs already supply them for their products. Ok, so a couple of your PCI cards may not have drivers for a couple of months. Well, don't upgrade yet. You live on the bleeding edge, you have to expect a few problems.

Trim down the server fat?

[sp0rk173]

When i ran Server 2k3 as my desktop, i had to ADD desktop fat. Turning on the Sound subsystem, install java, turn on graphics acceleration, loosen up security in IE, install firefox, enable direct X, install XP video card drivers (I had an ATi card back then, and they don't produce drivers for 2k3 like nVidia does), turn on image acquisition, turn on the CD burning subsystem, tweak memory usage to make it run more desktop-friendly. The only thing you actually turn off (and really don't have to) is that annoying shutdown tracker.

To me, and this is just me...you might have a totally different definition of "trim", that seems more like adding services that are unneeded for a server. Like i said before, Desktop "fat".

Stable?

[Anonymous Coward]

"actually looks like a stable OS."

I remember hearing that about NT, then NT4, then Win2K, then WinXP.

Sorry, Microsoft, you've cried wolf too many times. I don't believe it. Or maybe they mean "stable" as in "as stable as WinXP", i.e., "not very stable".

Re:Stable?

[fyrewulff]

if by "not very stable" you mean "XP has only crashed on me once in the last 3 years" like my experience, Linux must have negative crashes.

Re:cool

[ckaminski]

I've been doing catalog tearsheets for sometime in Photoshop, and I'm routinely getting up to gigabyte+ images. With WIN32 restricting me artifically to 2GB total memory usage per program, I cannot do much better than this without 64 bit support. And in a year or two, I may be pushing that limit.

32 bits is just barely sufficient for me now.

With most processors on the market in the next 2 or three years being 64 bit, who cares? It's the next wave.

MS haven't released rc1 to the public yet ...

[popoutman]

When you go through the signup procedure to order the beta/evaluation version, you get a link to an iso of a previous version. The latest publicly available .iso of winxp-64 is build 1218. Build version 1289 is the latest of windows server 2003-64bit, and that uses the same code as reviewed.

Build version 1289 of XP professional is MSDN only at the moment, and is supposed to be released to CPP towards the end of the month.

I am running 64-bit 2003 server at the moment on a 3000+ amd64 and it just flies along. No real issues so far, apart from dvd layback and some motherboard incompatibility with some graphics cards, but that is a seperate issue.

I'd suggest trying it for a while. Some of the default security makes sense now, compared to that in vanilla XP.