How much faster is xp 64 than 32? Is vista 64 ready for prime time yet? Will 64 bit make video editing faster? I have some questions on this and if anyone can answer I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks.

From my experience, XP 64 isn't faster than XP 32 unless the application is compiled to take advantage of 64 bit processing.

In more (but not geekish) detail, XP 64 provides benefit where you can take advantage of 64 bit registers. An application compiled as 32 bit will not do that and runs at 32 bit speed. Floatinf point calculations can take advantage of 64-bit architecture and would need a 64-bit OS to provide those registers.

On video editing, the dual or quad core will make it faster; it will also speed up if the editing application is 64-bit (and I don't know which such applications are 64-bit) and can thus double it's data rate through the registers.

On Vista 64, I kept clear of it because my Adobe products wouldn't run on Vista. I don't need to pay Adobe for an upgrade ffrom Photoshop 5.5; nor do I want to lose the use of PageMaker; nor did I want to pay for the Acrobat 8 upgrade for the privilege of using Vista. Then I'd expect to get nasty surpsies on a whole raft of software that works no problem in XP (32 or 64).

Hope that's informative.

If I am going to dual boot using xp 64 and vista 64 what things do I really need to know?
Hardware?
Software?
How do I find out what works?

Dont get 64.

32 has more drivers for it, 64 is very buggy and has limited drivers

I'm not sure what jbennet says is the best reason for not getting XP64. It works perfectly well and I use it daily.

Limited drivers? A moot point; all the nVidia drivers are there; all the HDDs are supported, etc etc. All the major printer brands.

Your challenge will be to find 64 bit video editing software. Anyway, as you know core 2 duo is 64 bit hardware and you can move to XP64 at any time in the future. Just make sure you can add lots of RAM to your mobo and not get one that's limited to 2GB.

FInally on Vista, I refer you to my earlier post. A heck of a lot of routine stuff doesn't work on Vista (but, of course, works on XP64!).

make sure you have PAE and remember to use the /PAE and /3gb switches if you have 4gb of ram or else XP will only use two

This article will explain PAE.
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system...AE/PAEdrv.mspx


The /3GB switch only applies to server versions of Windows so far as I know.

No, it works on my XP pro

Not contradicting you - but what do you do with this switch set that you can't do without it? What special applications do you have that need this switch to be set?

Isn't it just a means for Windows to give (virtual) memory to applications rather than to the system?

And as it's Virtual Memory, surely it doesn't matter whether or not you have 1 GB, 2GB or 4GB on your system?

no, your wrong

on a system with 4gb physical ram, windows gives 2gb to apps, and 2gb for itself and other system tasks

thats a waste

/3gb reduces the system to using only 1gb max, therefore giving another 1gb back to applications which are built to take advantage of this

you need this for running exchange/mssql properley

/3gb doesnt exist on 64 bit i dont think