XP32 vs Vista32vs Vista 64

G
Posted By
gowanoh
Mar 15, 2009
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1446
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Informal observation of disc access operations comparing Vista64 vs XP32 on the same machine: nearly equal. I was quite surprised. Of course this is a quad core uber machine with more ram than the 32 bit OS can access and may be particular to this configuration.
Vista 32: time by your wall clock minute hand slower–only a slight exaggeration.
Slooooowwww disc access has been, for me, the most disappointing aspect of Vista 32 compared to XP–an utter waste of the horsepower in a modern computer.
Win7: unusable due to instability and driver issues (this seems unusual for a new Microsoft OS, no?): unfortunately no exaggeration. If Microsoft is foisting a new driver model on peripheral vendors, as they did with Vista, Win7/Vista SP3 will be another Microsoft clusterf**k.
Conclusion: it is worth running Vista 64 instead of XP32, as opposed to Vista 32 for which the change from XP is not a rational choice, if you have the right hardware and programs that can benefit from the extra RAM. The right program is 32 bit Photoshop for which you will get, without having to resort to command line switches, an extra GB of RAM in which the program can run compared to a 32 bit OS.
The benefits of Photoshop CS4 64, which has total access to all that RAM, are more difficult to quantify. I see no significant time differences, meaning what a user notes in real time, performing the same operations on the same images in CS4 32 or 64. Few Photoshop users will ever process images that will run up against the RAM limits in a 32 bit OS, no matter what they imagine, and the most common 32 bit Plug-ins do not run on CS4-64.

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