My great 64 bit experiment is now over. I’ve gone back to Windows XP 32 bit. Why? Because it works and I really don’t need a 64 bit OS right now.
Back in late March of this year, I installed the final release of Windows XP Pro x64 on my dual XEON (Nocona based) system with much anticipation and unease. Although I had heard the OS was quite stable, I was still uneasy about what my user experience would be like given the fact that driver support was quite small and it was in many ways, a completely new OS for me. Sure much of the work on the OS had been done years ago when Microsoft first ported Windows XP to the IA64 platform. Going to the new ia32-64 extensions would be no big deal for Microsoft. However, this OS was effectively a version 1.0 product and one can never tell what you’re going to get from Microsoft.
However, the first three months were actually quite pleasant. Most of my applications installed without a hitch (of course some applications which used device drivers didn’t work at all in the 64 bit world). I had some oddities here and there but the system performed and worked much like my regular 32 bit Windows XP system. The fact that I didn’t have Norton AV installed was a bit disconcerting but Avast! AV was good enough for the task at hand.
It’s important to recognize that my system was in many ways – quite a simple system. I had SATA hard drives, a recent NVIDIA graphics card, on board sound using Realtek drivers – nothing exquisite. Thus driver support wasn’t as bad of an issue as I made it initially sound. Ok.. so that’s not a problem there.
Yet some strange things occurred. My OS began “slowing down” over the last few months. After a reboot, the system would just get slower and slower in response time. It reminded me of the old days of Windows when you simply HAD to reinstall the OS to get back the speeds you were accustomed to. Now, for me – this was probably not a Windows XP x64 problem as much as a configuration problem of some sort. I’m pretty sure I must have installed a fault app or made some configuration change that slowed me down… but for the life of me, I could not figure it out.
Thus last night, I decided to wipe my system out and start over again from scratch. This time, I would start with a XP 32 bit system again. It works; I have AV s/w for it; and it’s stable. Perhaps, when Longhorn arrives, I will try 64 bit Windows again but I have no need for the OS right now. Just b/c I have a 64 bit capable processor, does not mean that I need to go 64 bits.
The apps are not there. The driver support is not fully there. My life is not there yet. Thanks for the experience Microsoft – it was a good one but I will wait a little bit more.
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