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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."
Seems kind of funny after the whole NT on Alpha death microsoft induced. Now this should be the final blow (thankfully) for the UnObtanium.
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.
Wow...I feel like an idiot now....I guess I should read the whole thing first...
--<Mike>--
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
You just created a new acronym! RTFS!
WASTE - The Secure P2P
First the Windows anti-spyware outperforms ad-aware and spybot s&d now you're saying this thing looks like a stable OS?
Who are you and what have you done with Slashdot?
I, for one, will NOT welcome our new MS-loving overlords.
what you all mean. My Windows Server 2003 desktop (YES I USE IT AS A DESKTOP!) is perfectly stable and has yet to give me one single hiccup. Granted, I'm not much of a gamer, but this setup seems to be working like a dream for me.
if 64-bit will be present in Windows Longhorn
If you're interested, here's a good discussion on what 64-bit Longhorn will look like.
Sigs cause cancer.
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...
Live web cams
Er, I meant pictures.
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.
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
now u can sell your product to those who got amd64 comps for xmas and weren't told that the pre installed os would be holding them back. also congratulations to linux x86_64 which is going on 19 months old.
Every version of Windows looks stable. Just wait until you get that first STOP error.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
"Windows XP Professional x64 will be priced at the same level as the 32-bit version of Windows XP Pro, Microsoft said in a statement, and the three versions of Windows Server 2003 x64 will come with price tags similar to their 32-bit Standard, Enterprise, and Datacenter cousins." -informationweek.com
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.
Yup i found the same issues with my athlon 64 too. Another big big problem. SATA support is still not in natively. So you have to use the CD provided by the manufacturer. So if you build a brand new system with SATA, best of luck if you dont have the drivers on a floppy. Installation says press so and so key if you have SCSI/RAID drivers and then if you do so looks for them on floppy. Then there were some other bugs like wallpapers acting funny and all. I didnt really see a huge performance dip in Windows Explorer and Internet explorer, so i am sticking to my 32 bit XP for now.
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
It's soo darn stable
it can hold up my table
no booting this week.
A nice big square box
means my dinner rarely rocks
up solid all month!
Linux geeks trashing,
yet food is never crashing
Communists BEWARE!
-Don.
Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
Okay I get "M$", "Winblows" and "Windoze", even though I think it makes the writer look stupid, but how the hell is "Windose" supposed to be denigrating?
> *awaits justifications for why 64-bit linux platforms are better*
Because on a large & busy database server 8, 12, or 16 gbytes of memory is invaluable, and you can't get that via a 32-bit OS.
And frankly, if I'm going to spread a db2 ice cluster across twenty 64-bit blade servers, I'd much rather put it on aix or linux than windows.
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...
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*
---
For great justice move sig
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.
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.
I don't think that is the point. I think he is pointing out that spelling "Windows" as "Windose" does not make you more credible in a Linux crowd.
WASTE - The Secure P2P
It's interesting that 64bit windows requires more memory. If that applies across the board, I wonder if some people will suffer a degradation in performance because their RAM pool decreased. I doubt anyone with a 64 bit processor would skimp on RAM, but it's something to consider.
Sort of like in Linux if it's worth turning himem support on if you have a gig of ram I guess.
So basically it's as if you are using Windows 2000?
...the intrinsic bloated clunkiness of it is. The user experience remains a complete shitstorm.
--- Ban humanity.
MS Buys /.!
Linux has existed on 64 bit platforms for a number of years, running on Sparc, Alpha, PowerPC, IA64, AMD64 and probably a couple I've forgotten. It's a more mature 64bit offering.
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
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.
Please... if you seriously think 2000 or XP are no improvement over Windows 98 or ME then I have a wall in China to sell you. And if you can't get a modern windows system to stay up for more than 3 days then I have serious doubts about the competency of your "excellent" in house support staff.
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.
Two pro-MS summaries on /. in one day?
Satan is putting the snow chains on his SUV as we speak.
It seems that there is no NTVDM (WOW) for
running DOS or Windows 3.x applications.
Is it possible install 16-bit
subsystem manually using files
from 32-bit Windows XP?
As you suggested, it's primarily because of the drivers and because most games are not compiled natively as 64-bit executables yet. The 64-bit drivers from ATI and nVidia are still beta. No self-respecting person would base a final decision off of benchmarking such drivers.
However, even so, with some applications, I've noticed huge increases in speed when running non-DirectX/non-Opengl 32-bit applications in 32-bit emulation mode on my AMD 64 3500+ (with Windows XP Pro x64 Edition RC1). This is due to the fact that memory bandwidth is now doubled, as the WoW64 emulator is running 64-bit mode simulating an environment for the 32-bit apps.
Anyway, I suspect that shortly after Win XP Pro 64 goes gold, we'll see a lot of updates to 64-bit drivers that are still in beta.
Yes it's a spelling mistake, but it's a spelling mistake of a slur.
It was meant to be Windoze, but I'd guess that the submitter was from a non US country, and being stupid enough to think that Windoze is funny, was also stupid enough to not realise that it's only the -ise words in which we use 's' not 'z'.
Advanced users are users too!
WTF? Insightful?
Where are my mod points when I need them the most????? I could have used all of my mod points to mod this down FIVE TIMES! (Well, i know its not possible... but WTF)
Of course it doesn't.
You need to spell it Windoze.
The 'z' makes you really credible.
... 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.
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.
.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).
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
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!
Yeah. I can't even get past the initial terminal-style install to the GUI -- The blue screen BSODs on me. Ha.
Yeah, now there's 64 locations to have problems instead of 32! ;-) Does that mean we will have 2^64-1 number of viruses instead of only 2^32-1 of them?
:-)
Truthfully though, when microcomputers went from 8-bit to 16-bit they basically had a 1000% increase in speed simply because they could read twice as much. And yeah, going from 16mhz to 100mhz also had a bit to do with it. Going from 16-bit to 32-bit again greatly increased the speed of the computer. The move from 32-bit to 64-bit will again greatly increase the overall speed of the computer.
But there are a few things to think about. First, do you really need it? Computers are so fast now that most (but not all) common place usages are done instantaneously. Most (but again not all) games play smoothly. True, if you want to move even further down the road of real-time, photo realistic, computer graphics then 64-bit processors are the way to go (and so would 128-bit cpus). But this is only because it makes sense to be able to grab more information faster so it can be applied. But for most business usages? No. If it takes ten seconds or one second to recalculate an entire set of spreadsheets. Or if it takes a few seconds for MS-Word to reformat a paragraph - most people are satisfied.
Further, it is not just a matter of having a faster, better CPU. Whether 32 or 64 bit. It is also a matter of having faster memory, disk drives, graphic cards, and faster monitors. I just recently (like last week) had to replace my motherboard. The motherboard I had was from 1998. In computer terms - it was ancient. It used 133mhz memory and used the built in graphics (SIS) card. I've now upgraded to a new motherboard, 400mhz memory, and an ATI Sapphire graphics card. Just by doing that and keeping the same CPU the entire computer ramped up. It takes about a tenth of the time it used to to do anything. Never Winter Nights (or NWN) now runs without crashing, the game looks 100% better, response time is phenomenal. So although I know that a 64-bit computer would increase everything even further - this is really all I need for right now.
Finally, there is the consideration of money. First, we are going into tax season. Second, people have (and are) giving money to help out the people caught up in the tsunami incident. Third, how much will all of this cost? Will we have to rebuy everything yet again? If so, it is very unlikely that this will ever get off the ground for at least another five years. Not that it won't be available - just that most people are going to go "Why? What I've got is good enough."
Just a few thoughts.
And that is the main problem. Why upgrade when what you have is already good enough?
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
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!
Boxing Equipment Reviews
Probably to manage to do one more iteration of the algo utilized in the Rieman Hypotesis?
:%s/Open Source/Free Software/g
YTARY!
Let me get this straight. First, you say that WinXP 64 won't run your legacy DOS/Win3.1 applications, and then you say that these limitations don't exist for 64-bit Linux? But since when did 16-bit DOS or Windows 3.1 applications run under Linux without an emulator? Sure Wine will run 16-bit DOS and Windows 3.1 applications on Linux. But guess what? Wine is also available for Windows. As for the new driver model, I believe they changed it to increase security, stability, and the ease with which developers can create drivers. It's a good thing that they changed it, not a bad one. That does mean that a lot of old hardware won't be supported, and that that good drivers won't exist for other more modern pieces of hardware until the hardware vendors release them. But for one, Windows XP 64 was made for modern hardware, not old machines, and the shortage of some drivers is only temporary. So sure, you're stuck with using a limited array of hardware to start out with, but Linux still suffers from the same problem. There's unfortunately still a lot of Linux unfriendly hardware out there. All in all, I think you are being hypocritical, just for the sake of bashing MS. If you're going to bash them, at least do so with some solid facts. You're making the rest of us look bad.
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.
The version I used about 3 months ago didn't work with any copy-protection schemes. For example no Ubisoft games worked with it including Doom 3, Far Cry, and XIII. The really funny thing was that Ubisoft tech support didn't understand that I was using a beta XP 64-bit OS. They just kept telling me that there are no problems with Windows XP. I finally gave in, and reverted back to XP 32-bit.
Note that it also doesn't run 16-bit applications, which is rarely a problem, but every now and then I see something dumb, like an installer that has a 16-bit stub somewhere.
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.
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".
You are wrong. XP is based on the NT kernel, which is WAY better and more stable than the Windows Home 16-bit crashes-every-day kernel. I love Linux, and it's all I use (when I can help it) but to say that XP is less stable than any "old windows" like 3.x, 9x and ME is insane
Free software does everything Microsoft can and does it better.
Not true. Ever compared MSVS to Dev-C++? (hint hint MSVS wins)
Le français vous intéresse?
And you know, there's always one person who says that free software is better and that Windows crashes every hour for them. Oh hell, there are tons of those. If your XP and 2000 machines can't go past 3 days, that's sad. No really, I wonder what you do that makes them go under so fast. That takes talent. My Windows Server 2003 machine has a current uptime of over 24 days and 15 hours. Now, that's not as impressive yet as my FreeBSD server that has 87 days of uptime. But the point is, that Windows does not crash every day like the 9x days. And XP is NOT as buggy as Windows 3.1. I doubt you ever used 3.1 then if you can say THAT with a straight face.
mIRC randomly freezes (guessing probably some 16 bit code laying around somewhere).
And certain pictures in Firefox causes a crash in the video drivers.
Various 3rd party shareware progs I like dont run (again probably 16-bit code), like say the win32 openssl dlls.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Is a result of 's' being next to 'z' on my keyboard, and me not proofing on weekends out of principle. Secondly, credibility? Meh. I spell it that way mainly because it makes me smile, and it's my own pathetic way of soothing the pain from the the chafe-marks i have from using XP all week and only being able to use OSX at home.
"Nothing can shake my belief that this world is the fruit of a dark god whose shadow I extend." - Emil Michel Cioran
"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".
As i explain somewhere else, it was meant to be ..doze, but i don't proof on weekends out of principle, though maybe i should when submitting stuff to slashdot during (and not after) my first cup of coffee.
And yeah, i'm not from the US, but that doesn't make me illiterate (but i am aware i'm not helping my case much ATM).
"Nothing can shake my belief that this world is the fruit of a dark god whose shadow I extend." - Emil Michel Cioran
This OS is trash...I tried the 64-bit version, however it BSODed before it even got to picking the hard drive. And yes, I had the right drivers - and not like the hardware was uncommon either (NF3,A64, SATA) Fedora Core 3 installed without a hitch.
Now, I'm not one who normally defends Microsoft products, nor do I usually respond to trolls, but here goes:
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.
Given that almost all hardware manufacturers target Windows, I doubt this will be a problem for long for currently-supported hardware.
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.
Credit to Microsoft for finally taking the plunge and not supporting obsolete code. Nobody *has* to use 64-bit Windows, and frankly, using a 64-bit box to run 16-bit software is... a waste. Legacy support has bitten Microsoft in the ass more than a few times when it came to security problems with Windows. Besides, if you need to, you can always run old code using a product like VMware, as well.
These limitations don't exist for the 64-bit Linux versions.
This might be because the Linux kernel never "supported" 16-bit DOS or Windows apps by itself. (In fact, the Linux kernel can't run any 16-bit programs by itself, you needed a program like dosemu.)
Nice troll.
Microsoft ruled the 32-bit desktop but the 64-bit desktop should belong to Linux.
That may turn out to be true, but not for any reason you listed.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Who wants windows in 64 bits? I'd prefer my window in one bit, thank you very much.
It seems that there is no NTVDM (WOW) for
running DOS or Windows 3.x applications.
What 16-bit DOS or Windows applications are you running?
Is it possible install 16-bit
subsystem manually using files
from 32-bit Windows XP?
Probably not, but did you ever consider using virtualization software like VMware ($) or an emulator like bochs (free)? You could run your 16-bit code that way.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Most of the comments here say that the 64 bit versions of Windows or Linux (on a 64 bit machines) runs about as fast as the 32 bit versions (on 32 bit machines or Athlon 64). I would think we would see a BIG jump in performance.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
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.
You're so classy Svartalf, you're like a millionaire socialite out on the scene.
And now the Alpha is dead.
Post tenebras lux. Post fenestras tux.
> 1. What does that have to do with anything? This is a discussion about a 64-bit version of Windows.
read the parent post, it may make sense then.
> 2. You already can use 8, 12, or 16 Gigs of memory via a 32 bit OS. Look up Intel's PAE.
Yes, if I felt like rewriting application & database servers, I *could* do that. But I have no plans to develop my own database management software just so that I could use flaky 32-bit extentions.
Both Oracle & DB2 support this - but can only use the memory for buffer caching, not for sorting, or other memory needs. So, it has some value - and can be the strategy to get you out of a tight spot - but having personally seen OS patches cause problems with this functionality, I always avoid it. Especially since 64-bit is about all that we buy anymore in the unix world anyway.
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.
- This sig deliberately left blank. Nothing to see, move along.
It is impossible to use 32-bit drivers with a 64-bit kernel. Not even on linux.
DOS:
Wordstar 2000 (don't laugh)
Windows 3.11:
Client for Tobit Faxware 5.x
which is running on Netware 4.2 server
Don't you think that the predictability of any MS OS announcement drawing posts about its poor quality are a result of reliably bad MS software releases? We'd all rather use the economies of scale in development, purchasing, marketing and everything else offered by an environment "unified" under a Microsoft monopoly, if that monopoly didn't offer MS better economies in bad software than usable stuff. In other words, you're shooting the messenger, while MS has earned that reputation. Which you're denying like some kind of Microslave. Fuck yourself, but don't fuck with us.
--
make install -not war
I dunno, WinXP looks like a stable OS, until it freezes.
--
make install -not war
Nope, I think its the result of it being a popular thing to say on slashdot.
If this was a blog dedicated to high quality user interfaces then it would probably be very popular to trash Linux in a similar way.
As a matter of fact Windows was in 64 bit before Linux existed. The original Windows ran on MIPS and the 64 bit Dec Alpha.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Which distribution would you suggest then, if I want to build a 64bit desktop, and do things like run a scanner, a printer and my wifi card? And if I find a novel 32bit program, such as those Kento Cho shooter games written in D, can I run it?
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
so you don't need to notice any difference with your flesh-and-blood eyes.
It was just recently announced that Windows XP 64bit would be a free upgrade for 64bit CPU users that had purchased or received a computer with the 32bit version of Windows XP.
So it will be free if you already purchased the 32bit version for you computer. The retail prices for 64bit XP are expected to be the same as the 32bit version of XP.
The upgrade path is something Microsoft purposely left out for moving users to a 64bit world. So you will have to do a clean or full install of 64bit XP, upgrading from the 32bit version is not supported.
Don't worry, we physicists shall always find use for faster CPUs.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
Speed isn't really the issue with changing machine word size. It's nice to have larger "native" integers as that's what makes things faster really, but the biggest plus is addressable memory size.
I think the potential killer-app for 64-bit platforms will be fully persistent OSes. Unfortunately, they are still something of a research problem. The ideal platform, or OS, IMO would be a single addressable space with a Lispish OS built on top. Protection mechanisms would be at the desired granularity at all times (i.e. if a symbol is "bound" then the user has access to the object to which the symbol points to). Combine that with orthogonal persistence and global garbage collection and you have one hell of a platform... one that is optimized for malleability and experimentation, unlike today's systems which are organized around permenanence and standard compliance (many of which are obsolete). It's 2005 and we must still worry about memory corruption and the related security issues, viruses/worms, and media issues such as saving files, disk space issues (cleaning up, etc.). All which are unrelated to getting actual work done, but all can be automated and/or eliminated to some degree.
Dijkstra Considered Dead
Microsoft always makes such a big deal about backwards compatibility, and introducing ugly hacks to accomodate misbehaved programs. And on the other hand, they drop 16-bit support. I wouldn't mind if they used an emulator to run the stuff and the performance on 16-bit programs was 20x lower.
perhaps you should be working with smaller files. gig plus photos. is it a life size billboard catalog? a gig file goes well past 20x24".
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
Bash away! They're still in business!
you had me at #!
Im running the beta of win-64 on my machine and it runs fine. Only real issue ive had it incompatibility for 32 bit programs
"Could you put that in a memo entitled, SHIT I ALREADY KNOW!" - Sarge
What in the world is "|D|I|G|I|T|A|L|"??
So, what OS does it look like now?
Bullshit alert!
The original Windows ran on top of DOS, on 16/32 bit x86 only. The original Windows NT, which I think you are really talking about, was released in 1993 and supported 386 and MIPS, with later Alpha support. Linux was up to version 0.96 at that point.
32bit version of XP _Pro_
Home edition users are out of luck at least for now. There is no AMD64 XP Home, and unsurprisingly MS won't give you free upgrade to AMD64 Pro version from a 32bit Home version.
just got better, Bill Gates Owns Our Asses.
Er, even assuming that's true, don't you think 15 years is a long time to be getting Windows/64b to merely "look like a stable OS"? Since you think that kind of history is complimentary, of course you think it's popular on Slashdot because it's popular on Slashdot, ignoring all the evidence (on Slashdot and elsewhere) that MS produces great profits, but crappy software.
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make install -not war
Know anything about 64bit M$, other than Alpha? Tell me what you mean by stable when you talk about a system that has a four minute half life when attached to a network. How would you compare the UI to modern multidesktop environments such as KDE or Gnome? Why on Earth would I want to cripple a nice 64 bit computer with Windoze?
What you say has been said of every Microsoft Windows. The new one is always better than the old one, they say but the quality never changes. Expectations are so low that Steve Balmer can promise "insane" uptimes of 30 days with a straight face.
I've never seen the difference from one Windoze to another. Windows 2000 pro, which is still reputed to be more stable than XP home or pro, never lasted more than 3 days for me. That's despite excellent support by in house staff at both a fortune 500 company and at a computer wholesaler. XP is just as buggy as Windows 3.1 was and does not do a whole lot more.
Free software does everything Microsoft can and does it better.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
If you REALLY want to Run your DOS stuff, you can always use DOSBox (a DOS emulator) or Wine for Windows (Windows "emulator").
Windows isn't as portable as all that, really. One thing of note about _every_ processor architecture that Windows was ported to back in the 3.1/3.5x/4.0 days either was, or could be switched to, little endian mode. MIPS, PPC, and Alpha (which was used in 32-bit mode) - all of the above either came in a little-endian variant (MIPS), or could be switched into a little-endian mode on the fly (Alpha and PPC).
Linux, on the other hand, uses the native ordering mode on Alpha and PPC, and has builds for both little-endian and big-endian MIPS processors. It's not dependent on 32-bit mode, byte ordering, or other x86-alike properties to port it to other arches. What's the point of porting to another architecture if you're going to enable a bunch of compatibility hacks to make it behave as much as possible like an old, broken one? I don't think that's portability, really.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
Longhorn will have to be 64-bits.
Otherwise by the time it ships the clock bits will wrap around. (rimshot).
Be aware that, for a color magazine, you have to form pages in groups of 8, so every "image" (image and text composites) is 8 times the size of the standard magazine page...
So, color images, text, font information, etc., multiplied by 8... it can easily become a monster file my friend
No sig for the moment.
LOL, you're right - I misinterpreted the parent.
Sorry about that. No more coffee for me today.
ken
You do realize you can start a 32-bit cmd.exe by using Start->Run->%windir%\sys_wow64\cmd.exe
I ran the second version for quite a while, and it has some severe glitches everynow and then. Driver support sux, and sometimes certain websites will cause it to randomly turn off.
ModLife.Net - If it ain't modded, what's the point?
I'm pretty sure that NT for the Alpha Chip actually ran in 32 Bit mode. We still have an old Digital AlphaServer 1000A upstairs running as a simple NT4 file/print server for that floor, it's a solid old workhorse.
Jonathan
Twenty five years later UNIX has still not delivered a decent online help system and it still is nowhere near the levels of reliability VMS achieved.
It all depends on what you consider essential. I prefer to use an environment that does not appear to have the idea that its performing a continuous IQ test on the user.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Well, that's where we differ. I pass IQ tests with flying colors, so I prefer not to have my intelligence insulted by a half-bright OS. As for the online help system, I believe that "Unix" delivered something called the World Wide Web (the NextStep flavor, I believe), which has, happily, replaced most of the MS Help programs.
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make install -not war
No applications for a minority architecture of an OS is bad enough, what is amazing is that there were no appliactions for |D|I|G|I|T|A|L| Unix on Alpha boxes either. Even compiling open source often meant trying to hack the build system for a vaguely similar platform.
I think one thing that really didn't help with NT on Alpha application availability was there was no affordable compiler. They simply didn't offer the "Professional" edition (that was ~$100 for VC++ on X86 at the time) -- you had to get the Enterprise edition for a few hundred more.
A few years back I would have happily run NT on Alpha, but there was no way I was going to pay $300+ just for the compiler when I was in college..
Now..if they included the RISC versions of the tools on the X86 CDs for no extra cost, we could have actually at least seen a few more unsupported Alpha builds of apps. The barrier to entry of building RISC NT apps was way too high..
"Microsoft", "Windows", and "Stable OS" in the same paragraph? I hope there's an edit for this in the near future.
-- Eekrano
...
No. It wasn't. Linux = 1991; Windows NT = 1993.
End. Of. Story.
we are slashdotting microsoft.com
I was pointing out how damned silly it was the way he went on about it and then people modded him up.
He was as guilty of the thing he was complaining about as the orginal poster- if what he was talking about was really valid.
But then, I guess that's really what's wrong with Slashdot- people are so clueless that they think a whiner is insightful and the person pointing it out is "classy" in the sarcastic manner and trolling...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I have a degree in Nuclear Physics and a measured IQ that is more than three standard deviations above the mean.
I believe that "Unix" delivered something called the World Wide Web
Funny you should raise that one given that I worked on the Web back in the earliest days. The code all ran on VMS or UNIX.
Linux is nowhere near a match for the Nextstep environment that the Web was originally built on and it is completely ridiculous to claim Nextstep as a UNIX 'flavor' as if the differences were minor issues of taste. Nextstep was an engineered system, UNIX was is and probably always will be a botch job.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
No but they will let you buy it at the upgrade price from home to pro.
And if there is a manufacturer shipping home edition on a 64bit system, they are the ones that need to be yelled at, as Microsoft's OEM division even tells them not to do this.
If I may, there's something that should be pointed out to you and the OP: the AMD64 specification does not include a 16bit mode when running in 64bit mode. The two 64bit modes available are "pure"(which is literally pure 64bit mode) and "compatibility" which lets the processor run in 64bit mode while being able to run specific threads in 32bit mode, hence allowing 32bit programs to run with almost no performance hit, save some DLL Hell from needing the 32bit DLLs. Compatibility mode doesn't support 16bit threads however(you must be running pure 32bit mode to run 16bit threads), so there are two points I'd like to make: 1) It's not MS's fault that there isn't 16bit support, this is a hardware limitation, as they'd need a full emulator to get any sort of 16 bit support. And 2) AMD deserves the credit for killing 16bit, not MS.
Given that almost all hardware manufacturers target Windows, I doubt this will be a problem for long for currently-supported hardware.
I think Microsoft has delayed releasing the x86-64 compatible version of Windows XP for two reasons:
1) Driver compatibility issues. Microsoft wants to make sure that the vast majority of hardware manufacturers will have 64-bit Windows device drivers available when this new version of Windows XP finally ships.
2) Making sure it works on both AMD and Intel CPU's. I believe that Microsoft--in a political move--waited for Intel to finally "catch up" with x86-64 support on Intel's own CPU's before this new version of Windows XP becomes commercially available.
I expect Windows XP 64-bit editions to ship around the March-April 2005 time frame.
Nice to see an explanation that good old V86 is not available anymore. What I begin to wonder is if vmware or other virtualization-without-emulation software will be able to run 16-bit code under these conditions? Will the only way really be a bochs-like emulation? Naturally, there are many other packages with better performance than bochs, but it's still far more than vmware or its siblings.
Neither of the 64 bit modes on the AMD64 or EMT64 processors support running 16bit processes. It's a hardware limitation which probably saved a bit of transistors and helped clean up the design a bit.
If you want to run 16bit programs in 64bit mode, you'll need to emulate the cpu or due some heavy duty virtulaziation.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
Except for the version of NT that's running on the new XBox2 using PPC970/"G5" CPUs, that only run big-endian (same reason it took so long to have an OS X on G5 version of Virtual PC).
It wasn't lack of software that killed NT/PPC, it was lack of hardware. When Apple didn't come to the table with a CHRP or PReP Mac, there wasn't anywhere to buy a remotely-affordable PPC machine to run Windows on.
I tried the early access version of Solaris 10 with JDS recently, and it blew me away. Anyone with broadband who can download the ISOs, I highly recommend giving it a spin.
Microsoft is being eaten at by IBM, Sun, Red Hat, Novell, Ximian--basically everyone who isn't Microsoft. The next few years are going to be extremely interesting.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
"To infinity and beyond!"
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
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.
No, 16-bit applications are not supported on the 64-bit operating system for technical reasons. Some of those are probably described on the internet already, I don't want to attempt that right now, I wouldn't want to get a bit wrong going off the top of my head. (think address space, pointers, bit shuttling, overhead, etc)
In general this won't be a problem, but there are still some current apps (modern 32-bit apps) that use 16-bit installers. There are a number of things being done to mitigate this issue, including working directly with the application vendors to make sure they understand the issue.
Sorry but this wasn't a troll although I admit it does sound that way. The problem is that Microsoft did not support running any 16-bit software on the x86-64 machines even though the hardware is physically capable of running 16-bit software in a 16-bit compatibility submode while in the 'long' mode. Microsoft did support the 32-bit compatibility sub-mode but even that is not real good. Emulators that access the hardware (for performance reasons) such as VPC will not be able to use the 16-bit capability because it has not been supported by Microsoft. To run 16-bit software, the Microsoft Virtual PC would have to emulate the 16-bit capability in software and it does not have that ability. Unless Microsoft adds 16-bit emulation to Virtual PC or adds 16-bit support to their 64-bit OS, there will be no DOS, Win9x, or Win ME running under Virtual PC on 64-bit Windows since all of those offer 16-bit support as a part of the OS. Linux and BeOS, however, do support running 16-bit software on the 64-bit software when it is in long mode so perhaps a future linux 64-bit virtual pc will be able to support running Windows 9x. Now *that* would be ironic.
Why does this even matter? Well, there is a lot of 32-bit Windows software that uses 16-bit installers, for one example. Obviously none of that will install on 64-bit Windows. More importantly, enterprise sites use a lot of legacy software developed over many years that they will not just drop. Linux actually offers a better migration path to move to 64-bit while supporting legacy software than Windows does.
The driver situation is also a problem. Yes, new hardware will have 64-bit drivers but most existing hardware will not, especially peripherals.
There is no content on WU for XP x64 at the moment. (because there are no patches needed)
The error you are getting is misleading, don't worry about it. The current live site didn't support x64 when we released RC1, so it didn't have all the correct error messages in it. The pages that do support x64 will be live soon (if they aren't already).
You're overstating it. While there was only a fraction as much 3rd party software available as AXP binaries compared to x86, there was still quite a bit. You might not be able to find programs like Bonzai Buddy for Alpha, but any company that made enterprise-level software (database, antivirus, network management, etc) had AXP versions of their software for sale along side their x86 binaries.
Remember, in the early days, it looked like DEC Alpha could possibly overtake Intel x86 as THE computer platform, so just about every company was providing AXP versions of their products to be ready, just in case DEC quickly took over the world
Even today, there are still versions of Diskeeper for NT4 on Alpha (and PPC!). And programs like Putty and InfoZip have up-to-date AXP binaries available.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I hope that "free" sounds good to you :) Once we RTM there is going to be a program in place where you can swap your 32-bit license for a 64-bit license. I don't know all the details on it, like time frames and stuff, but we aren't going to be penalizing the early adopters.
Remember the "File and Settings Transfer Wizard" that helped people migrate between machines, and even different OS versions? (I think it was released with the original XP) It supported moving files between like Win 95, 98, XP, etc by direct cable connection or by generating a file of settings that could be transfered some other way (drive, net).
Well, it is still around. You will be able to use it to migrate your files and settings from your old 32-bit install to your new 64-bit install.
Interesting trivia...
The northbridge-CPU bus used on the Athlon is the EV6 bus... hailing from the EV6 DEC Alpha CPU.
I haven't seen a blue screen or stop error in Windows XP in the two years I've been running it.
Yeah.. Windows XP 32-bit edition has a "WINE" of sorts. Its called WoW. Yes, it works the same way as Wine. And they omitted it in XP 64-bit.
Of course they do. Pro version is substantially more expensive, and offers just about zero features that a home user needs.
Not that a home user needs 64bit addressing anytime soon either. It's a nice feature in AMD64 CPUs since it basically doesn't cost you any extra, but offers nothing to an average home user right now.
I think the previous post was asking how easy of a transition it was going to be. It won't be an upgrade that preseves installed applications, so some work is required.
But you are right, the file and settings transfer wizard and even a basic backup and you will move to the new install pretty easily.
It has been some years ago, but I saw both WordPerfect and Corel Draw running well on NT on Alpha at CeBit in Hanover. So what?
NT was a 32-bit operation, even on Alpha. VMS and Unix, on the other hand, supported real 64-bit applications, memory management, etc. at the time. Then and now, I couldn't care less about Windows running on the hardware because there was no discernable difference in the products for all the effort (at the time I still occasionally ran Windows so I might have cared, which I do not today).
Selling 64 bits was/is like selling the hydrogen car. It is of significant value, but getting the masses to move requires considerable compatibility with the existing infrastructure, and most will judge it on criteria of not what it could be but how well it runs their existing apps.
Intel has already sold 10x the number of x86-64 parts. AMD needs to "catch up".
Care to enlighten me which Intel CPU's run x86-64 instructions outside of a few Xeon models?
I agree with parent; and, if you want to make it clear that you are not talking about windows, use Microsoft Windows (or MSW for short) which is its official name.
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
I did nothing to them. Really, nothing but my job and let the support staff at both companies deal with it. I did install Mozilla, which you would think helped. Other than that, zippo and they both got flaky.
Now the funny thing is that, like you, at home my Linux runtimes are much better. Woody and Sarge last longer than my electricity. Even Experimental and unstable stay up for months if I don't swap out kernels. It works like that on boxes that I've cobbled together myself, sometimes litterally from other people's garbage. These machines perform all of my computing tasks, from compiling to spam filtering and they do it all with free software.
And XP is NOT as buggy as Windows 3.1. I doubt you ever used 3.1 then if you can say THAT with a straight face.
I administered Windows 3.1 as part of a job for two years. They were connedted directly to the internet and were no worse than any modern Microsoft junk. Windows 3.1 was on the second computer I owned personally. Dos, 3.1, 95, 98, XP and 2000, that makes four upgrade train steps I've seen. Since DOS, the overall quality and usefulness of Microsoft operating systems has remained constant. A Dell bought today will be bundled with software that does exactly the same thing as the 486 I bought from them in 1993, and it won't do it much faster. I still have a copy of that 1993 software on a not much newer computer, just for kicks. I'm working on running it in Bosch.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Congratulations! By posting as an Anonymous Coward, you managed to submit a post in which every single sentence is wrong. If you had used "UH" instead of "A" in the second sentence, then every word would have been wrong, a perfect post. But I digress. Now, back to the demerits of Windows...
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make install -not war
I know what you mean. When we worked on an IMAX film we had to break the images up into 4096x4096 parts in order to get the larger 19Kx19K sized images. We too, were limited by the OS's ability to ramp up past 2GBs in both memory as well as disk drive files.
The thing is - we now can do those huge films with ease because of the work done at IBM as well as at SGI. Their filing enhancements (and ext3) allow us to have huge files. The memory problem though - still exists.
As others have pointed out - Windows XP should handle these problems (although the disk drive problem of not really removing the directory entries will bite you sooner or later [and for evreyone out there I will try to find the SGI white paper on the problems of Windows XP's disk drive NTFS methodology]).
Anyway, gotta run!
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
Try the 64-bit version of POVRay and run the benchmark suite...compare the time with the 32-bit version of POVRay.
2) AMD deserves the credit for killing 16bit, not MS.
Maybe some of the credit, but Microsoft still could have supported the code, as you pointed out, through full emulation. They are clearly willing to do this to support 32-bit software because they have implemented full emulation for 32-bit code in 64-bit Intel processors that don't include a 32-bit compatibility mode.
Historically, M$ has bent over backwards to provide legacy support. This is a definite change for them. No matter, as I pointed out in another post, a full Pentium emulator is available to anyone who needs to run 16-bit code (or any 32-bit code that doesn't seem to work on AMD64).
If there is truly a need to run software that old on AMD64, it can be done.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
Well, when you upgrade to 64-bit, it sounds like Bochs might be something you'll be interested in.
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
um. do you realize how many bytes you can address with a 64 bit pointer? unless i screwed up my arithmetic, you can allocate a 8 byte quantity every nanosecond and still not run out of virtual address space for more than 70 years. good luck buying that much physical memory (a small number of exobytes)
IIRC windows on Alpha could run 32 bit binaries due to a translation layer called FX!32. It's amazing how similar that seems to be to the WoW64 layer in windows x64 edition. The Alpha is dead, long live the Alpha!
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
I don't need that much memory. Just be able to use a fraction thereof. Once upon a time, 32bits was enough for me. But my computers now have 2GB of ram and 3 GBs of swap, and I routinely eat into my swap file.
I'd be happy right now with process space around 4 GBs, but Windows and Linux reserve at least 1GB for themselves (Windows reserves 2GB - why the hell that decision was made still boggles my mind).
It may indeed be, but I was forced into it quite by surprise and photoshop was indeed all I am familiar with. We do catalog layout, package design, and almost post-sized prints of our catalog pages.
:-)
Then I tried using it as a layout tool for my patio stones. That's when I busted a GB.
Methods are methods. Like all things in business, sir, it's the end result that counts. Someday, maybe I'll learn Illustrator and Pagemaker.
Yeah, I know what it was meant to be... but using an ASCII representation of a company's logo in a piece of writing, rather than the company's name (Digital Equipment Corporation), or a commonly-used abbreviation (Digital or DEC), is silly. Not that there's anything wrong with being silly... but then when it's done wrong, that silliness turns into stupidity. The old DEC logo is lowercase. If IcarusMoth really had an Alpha, perhaps he could've looked at the logo on the case and gotten it right.
In other news, my drill works very poorly as a toothpick, and my hand makes a bad hammer.
If the tool for doesn't work, it does not nessecarily follow that the tool needs to be redesigned. There are lots of good reasons to go to 64bit, but "the ability to layout my patio in photoshop" is *not* one of them.
George II -- Spreading Freedom and American values, one bomb at a time.
> "actually looks like a stable OS."
Surely you can't make that judgement without having it installed and in daily use for at least six months. The bit rot has not had time to set in, the reviewer's machine probably didn't even get to Cruft Factor 1.