[DeRose306]

Downloaded XP Pro X64.

It actually worked out nice, I had a 250gb HDD partitioned into 2 equal partitions.

Left regular XP on C: and installed XP X64 on D: Now I get a promt at startup asking me which to run. Very nice touch.

I ran SiSoft Sandra under 32 bit windows and 64 bit windows, there is a decent improvement.

No problems so far on running 32 bit programs under X64. Even installed Doom 3 and noticed no loss of performance.

Macromedia Flash and other browser plug in's aren't supported yet, that I have found. But thats livable for me.

As far as looks, layout, usabililty, ect. I notice no difference between the 2. I'm keeping it for now and dual booting, if anything else I can use it to play games on and use 32 bit XP for goofing off, web browsing, ect.

BTW, the trial priod shows to be 183 days, 6 months. Hopefully by the time the trial period ends, all the stuff that isn't supported might be. If so, I'll buy it. I like it so far.

My 2 cents for what it's worth. Try it, dual boot and you loose nothing.

One more thing. It could come in handy. Both OS's can see all files on both drives, so if I do have a catastrophic crash with my original windows, I can still backup my files with XP X64 before doing a reformat/reinstall. Could come in handy

[Beginner]

i installed win64 on my dad's buddies pc as a dual boot, as far as o/c'ing win64 was the bottleneck.

the nf3 pc would clock to 2.5ghz under win32 stable, win64 would run stable at 2.3ghz.

on the win64 partition i did install the 64bit drivers for the mobo/video card etc.

i didn't bench it so who knows, maybe 2.3ghz on 64 was faster than 2.5ghz on 32???

[dreammmatt]

Originally Posted by Beginner

i installed win64 on my dad's buddies pc as a dual boot, as far as o/c'ing win64 was the bottleneck.

the nf3 pc would clock to 2.5ghz under win32 stable, win64 would run stable at 2.3ghz.

on the win64 partition i did install the 64bit drivers for the mobo/video card etc.

i didn't bench it so who knows, maybe 2.3ghz on 64 was faster than 2.5ghz on 32???

I would have to assume that 'no' 2.3 would not be any faster. If it is, then it would be in only certain applications and benchmarks that are optimized for 64-bit. Legacy 32-bit would respond the way a 32-bit processor would respond if u dropped from 2.5 to 2.3GHz. So put simply, difference in speed depends on what you do with ur system.

The common phrase about "lack of support" is the main reason that a lot of people (myself included) havent made the move to X64 yet. It responds faster from what I've heard, so it's good for an overclocker who want the quick 'feel'----but I'm one of the overclockers that wants to maximize my practical performance.

Dying to try X64 tho

[TimoneX]

I installed flash to firefox under XP64 w/o a problem, but I had to download and install it manually as I recall. I actually use XP64 as my primary MS OS, though I prefer Linux to it. I have XP32, XP64, and Xandros 3.02 triple booting on this system. Of the 3 of them XP32 is the only one that gathers dust. Frankly if I could locate a 64bit printer driver(QMS 2300w) & a 64bit Scanner driver(Microtek 6USL) then I'd likely uninstall XP32 completely.

[Beginner]

Originally Posted by dreammmatt

I would have to assume that 'no' 2.3 would not be any faster. If it is, then it would be in only certain applications and benchmarks that are optimized for 64-bit. Legacy 32-bit would respond the way a 32-bit processor would respond if u dropped from 2.5 to 2.3GHz. So put simply, difference in speed depends on what you do with ur system.

The common phrase about "lack of support" is the main reason that a lot of people (myself included) havent made the move to X64 yet. It responds faster from what I've heard, so it's good for an overclocker who want the quick 'feel'----but I'm one of the overclockers that wants to maximize my practical performance.

Dying to try X64 tho

thanks for the info. i read that farcry can run on win64 with a performance increase over win32???

when i did the win64 partition, i only had it on for about 6 hours before the pc was picked up. i really didn't notice anything running faster or it booting up quicker.

[DeRose306]

Any native Win32 apps will run as fast or slightly slower on Win64, only because they are not set up to take advantage of the 64bit architecture(sp?)

With programs optimised for Win64, that's where you'll see the difference.

I'm just really hopeful that we'll see more support for Win64 in the future.

I'm just happy that for now we have the option of dual booting and trying it for free.