M1330 and Vista 64-bit or 32-bit??

Right, I should be getting my M1330 soon, but I was just wondering what your opinion was on this.

I will obviously be doing a clean install when I get it, and I have Vista Ultimate 32-bit, and Vista Ultimate 64-bit on disc.

Which one should I opt for putting onto my lappy when it gets here?

I would like 64-bit, but I have heard that you cant get unsigned drivers to work with it, however you can with Vista 32-bit, and AFAIK, some of the drivers for certain hardware I use is not digitally signed!

 

What hardware ? check for the drivers first. Follow the link below for 64 bit help.

I run x64 Vista and love it.....its definitely more responsive than x86 !!

 

You must be rich! Did you really pay for the discs?

Stick with 32-bit Vista OS for the time being unless you desperately need 64-bit OS for something that you only know! There are workarounds and patches to make your 64-bit Vista OS fully functional, so no problem on this side either!

 

no!

They are pre-activated too, so no messing about!

 

a Microchip PICDEM FS USB Development Board, a Microchip PICDEM 2 PLUS Development Board, a Microchip MPLAB ICD 2 (In Circuit De-bugger), a UZBee module, and a couple of other development stuff!

They all have Vista drivers, but not all of them are signed or certified for Vista 64-bit!

 

Vista 64-bit... Some Things (Printers, Scanners, etc.) dont have available Drivers for 64-bit-check your manufacturers site for 64-bit Drivers. Can also handle over 3GB of RAM (memory)

Vista 32-bit... Drivers are not an issue. But only can go up to 3GB of memory.

Hope I could Help

 

Hope you aren't pirating!

 

There's more to 64bit than just being able to address more memory. Not only do you of course get way better performance due to it being more capable with 64bit math, you also get more registers and other instructions that help improve perf. Clearly that doesn't help when running 32-bit apps, but most of the intensive stuff where you would care about perf has 64bit versions (ie Windows Media Encoder etc).

If you're just doing basic computing and gaming though, while the OS will certainly reap some benefit since it's natively 64-bit, the apps won't be a whole lot faster.

It's also not just drivers that may not be compatible with 64bit (and drivers must not only be signed, they must be natively compiled specifically for 64bit), but also apps may not be. On 64 bit Windows it effectively runs 32bit programs in a sort of "emulation" state (called Windows on Windows 64 or WoW64 for short). While the actual code runs natively on the CPU and is full speed, some things like registry access and file access can be sort of re-routed under the covers to make the magic of 32-bit apps co-existing with 64-bit apps a reality. 99% of well written apps work great, but there'll be probably 1% of apps that just won't work out of the box with 64-bit (a lot of times it's just he installer that has a problem).

For some of the Microchip hardware, some of it may just use the standard HID class USB driver, which means you don't need any extra driver. You've got a decent shot at it working fine on 64bit.

All that being said, you proably aren't going to see anything more than maybe 10% sort of improvemet from 64bit at best, which is nice but for most people not worth the hassle.


PS
Let me know if you get MPLAB etc all running on 64bit, I'm curious to know how it turns out.

 

Not true. Vista 32-bit can address 4 GB, and on every Santa-Rosa machine I've tried, you see 3.5 GB on Vista 32-bit, and on the older ones, most were 3.25 GB, and only one (with a high-end 8600GTS card) showed exactly 3 GB.

Either way, typically, a Vista 32-Bit install will see 3.25-3.5 GB out of a theoretical maximum of 4 GB.

 

For those who are going to use a 64-bit OS just for using 4GB of memory, you should know that memory only aids a little in performance!

 

EXCELLENT info mate! K++ to you!

My M1330 was shipped yesterday, so I should hopefully have it in the next few days...I'll install Vista Ultimate 64-bit and try and get my hardware, MPLAB, etc working, and I'll let you know what happens!

If worst comes to worst, I'll just put the 32-bit version on there.

Me...pirate Micro$haft, oops I mean Microsoft software...never!