Upgrading to XP-64?

[howeird]

I've had it with Vista. My PC is at a crawl, which it should not be with a quad-core CPU, 4GB RAM, SATA drive and fast Intel motherboard. Little annoying things are adding to the misery:

• Third party software can't get a time server connection
• The network comes up as local-only, which screws up auto-launch of email, IM and RSS programs
• (it takes about 5 minutes for Vista to find the Internet through my home router)
• It keeps asking permission to run programs even though I'm logged in as administrator
• It won't let me access all my folders, even though I'm logged in as administrator
• It won't let all programs write to all folders
• Drivers for webcam and audio magically stop working and need to be re-installed
• Many of my apps have limited features with Vista
• It eats 2GB of RAM just for the OS

The reason I installed Vista was to get the speed from 64-bit dual core and double the RAM. My system is dual-booted with XP-32bit, and in that mode it works a lot faster, especially powering up. I own a copy of XP-64, so...

So while all you pagans are dancing around big rocks and all you Christians are contributing to global warming by killing evergreen trees, firing up strings of colored lights and driving or flying to see distant relatives, and all you Jews are going out for Thai or Chinese food, I'll be slapping a pair of hard drives into the PC, making them into a RAID1 mirrored array, and installing XP-64 and all my apps and drivers. Then I'll nuke Vista. Oh what fun!

Or maybe I'll just go all the way back to XP-32 - I need to research driver availability first, I guess.

Comments

[mastersantiago.livejournal.com]

I've been running Vista on my new laptop since I got it and I haven't had any of these problems. Is there anything you can think of that you ran into that might have started this ball rolling in the first place? Just in case I need to keep an eye out for anything...

[howeird]

There was no real start, it's always been slower than expected. I thought some of it might be from anti-virus software, but I switched from McAfee to Trend Micro and there was no change. I have a ton of apps on the machine, which is probably a factor.

[didjiman.livejournal.com]

There is NO reason to go to XP-64 unless you have large dataset for database usage etc. Go back to XP SP2. Also XP-64 requires... new drivers.

[howeird]

Well, I have a 64-bit CPU...

[didjiman.livejournal.com]

So does everyone with a X86 chips from the last 3-4 years since AMD's Sledgehammer. It does 64 bits things faster but there isn't any 64 bits things to do normally. Not web browser, not word processors, not even Excel or photoshop. It has less incompatibility than Vista but why waste more time?!

[unseelie23.livejournal.com]

64 bit XP is even less supported than 64 bit Vista, in my experience. You would likely be better off going back to 32 bit XP SP2, or SP3 when that's released. My experiences with testing SP3 is that it's faster than XP SP2 and Vista SP1.

[howeird]

Yeah, from what everyone is saying in the forums, XP Pro is the right answer. I'm already double-booting to it for some of my apps which Vista won't run, may as well go back to it full time.