Windows Vista - 32 Bit oder 64 Bit? Was wählt ihr?

DevilMayCry! schrieb:

Vista macht eigentlich nur Sinn wenn man eine Direct X10 fähige Karte hat sonst kann man auch erstmal noch bei XP bleiben.

Zum Vergrößern anklicken....

Welcome to Hell: Software compatibility and Vista x64

You think you're tough? Then try running Windows Vista in x64 mode: It can make a grown man wail like a little girl whose brother just catapulted Barbie over the fence. What's insidious about it is that the first impressions are deceptively good: After installing the thing in under 30 minutes and watching it recognize every single piece of hardware connected to my PC, I started installing applications thinking that this, finally, might be the time to move fully to x64 on my desktop machine.

Big mistake. Applications like Microsoft Office work just fine on the x64 versions of Windows Vista, but almost nothing else does. Adobe Photoshop won't install at all, citing an unspecified compatibility issue. Ditto for Virtual PC 2004. And AnyDVD. And Nero. And iTunes.

Yikes.

Then there are the applications that install just fine but silently fail in different ways when running. The Flickr Uploader application is a good example: This one installs as you'd expect. But when you right-click an image file to upload it, there's no Send to Flickr option in the pop-up menu. The reason is simple: Shell extensions for 32-bit applications won't work in x64 Windows versions. So applications like WinZip and WinRAR will have similar issues.

Quite quickly, it became obvious that x64 was going to be a nonstarter for me. So I wiped out the install and reinstalled the 32-bit version. And now, everything works. I'm so glad that only lasted half a day. Learn from my mistakes and just skip x64 unless you really know what you're doing. Or maybe you just hate yourself.

Zum Vergrößern anklicken....

Compatibility issues and other limitations

Sadly, the various benefits of the x64 Vista versions are counterbalanced by a number of limitations, the most important of which are compatibility issues. 16-bit applications are not supported, which is less problematic than it was a few years ago, but still an issue for some applications that use legacy application installers. 32-bit device drivers are not supported, so you can't use any of the existing hardware drivers out there, but must instead use the subset of x64-based drivers out there. This situation will improve over time, but x64 Vista users are going to be orphaning hardware. You'll also need to bring along a hardware compatibility list when shopping for new peripherals, shades of the bad old NT 4.0 days.

One of the key features of Windows Vista, automatic registry and file redirection--which, when combined with Microsoft's per-application and per-application-class "shimming," is responsible for most of this operating system's application compatibility capabilities--is not available on the x64 versions of Windows Vista. This is a major handicap and will presumably mean that many legacy applications simply will not run on the Windows Vista x64 versions. Too, new 64-bit applications will need to adhere to the new Windows Vista application standards in order to run correctly on these versions. That means that even some software written specifically for XP x64 might not work correctly.

Those hoping to upgrade should be aware of a few issues, too. 32-bit versions of XP can only be upgraded to 32-bit versions of Windows Vista. And Windows XP Professional x64 Edition can only be upgraded to 64-bit versions of Windows Vista (Business and above).

Finally, it's worth noting that while Microsoft is proudly trumpeting the fact that Vista's new modular architecture will allow corporations to rollout Vista to multiple desktop types using only a single Windows Imaging Format (WIM)-based installation image, the truth is a bit more complicated. Companies that plan to rollout both 32-bit and 64-bit Vista versions will need to maintain separate install images for both 32-bit and x64 Vista versions.

Zum Vergrößern anklicken....