hi peoples,
having just ordered me a nice shiny new 64bit shuttle im now thinking about the os it will run…
now given that vista is just arround the corner, do i…
any other comments or suggestions greatfully recived, but as its a box for gaming no “run linux” type stuff please 
In my experience there is a serious lack of application and driver support for XP64. May just be that both the bits of kit I refer to are HP and they are not supporting XP64 with all hardware. Other than that I like XP64.
DT.
Still got a few driver issues with the XP64 installs at the office. Having to dual boot them for some apps. Recon on Vista being even worse for a while. 
Balrog says - Never be the first with new ware. Esp if its starts with Micro 
EDIT
There’s no poll option for niether.
I did a fair amount of research on this subject because I was asking the same question when I bought my A64. Essentially what I found echos what DT and Balrog just said. It’s Microsoft’s first shot at a desktop 64-bit system, and like everything MS does, the first is usually severely lacking. MS is pretty good at making the second version of something much better. I’m waiting until they come out with SP1 for Vista before upgrading.
The other consideration is that a 64-bit system doesn’t improve gameplay right now because the games are all 32-bit. The difference between running a 32-bit game on both 32 and 64 bit systems has been benchmarked by several review sites. The results are the same: no difference. Until MS gets 64-bit right, good drivers start flowing, and the games are written in 64-bit natively, it’s not worth it.
:withstup: Yup what they said Let it mature a bit first. That will probably be some time after Vista has been launched before it is well supported and may have any significant benefit.
… so plan it into your pension fund so you can afford the working version when it’s ready 
or install Ubunu 5.10 for AMD 64 and have 64 bit goodness now with great RAC.
totally agree 
initial tests not so good!!
I had a look an XP64, really doesn’t seem anything special. Performance was generally equal or worse than the i386 cousin. I haven’t found any Windows programs with a good performance boost to make it worthwhile yet, but admittedly not looked that hard.
Ubuntu AMD64 seems a little unsupported too, hopefully the next release will bring a bit more maturity. Then again i’m a essentially a linux noob, was quite an achievement just getting UT2004 running in Ubuntu (CD version was a bit of a pain to install for a noob!), only to patch it and find it stopped working :doh:.
I tried XP64 a few times and it was way too unstable. Landed up removing it and using regular XP+SP2. It seems to be the best version of Windows yet:nod:
imho, it all depends on your hardware, peripherals and what you do with your system, I have x64 running on my main machine, no problems at all,
BUT
I also dual boot to Vista 64 bit, which is not as good, Vista drivers are tough enough to come accross but 64 bit ones even worse. ut hey that’s the joys of running pre-release software.
Just as a side note, for anything that fails to run under X64 I have a virtual machine running normal XP pro that I can fire up when necessary, infact it tends to run most of the time so I can access my Netgear SC101 through it (there arent x64 drivers for it, never mind vista ones)
32 bit all the way IMHO
Even Linux which has better 64-bit support overall shows little or no improvement when used with most apps. The biggest difference between the two architectures is that 64-bit allows the use of 64 bit memory registers, 32-bit allows only 32 bit. Most apps don’t need 64 bit register addressing and so show little or no improvement. The things which have been shown to take a performance boost are apps like databases and SQL/web servers, but on a small dataset the differences are again miniscule. It’s only when the datasets get large that real benefits appear - we are talking of 10-12% as a “real” benefit.
The only reason I run 64 bit Linux on my platforms where appropriate is to take advantage of compiler options used (the system is compiled for the 64 bit chip family where appropriate), as opposed to the “generic” i386 version. For those Linux distros which ship an i686 version my gut feel is that this would probably execute just as fast on an AMD 64 as their 64 bit siblings.