In the constant search for the perfect desktop OS for me, I've recently made the leap to 64-bits, with surprising results. Not only is my system as stable as it's ever been, the performance increase over Vista x86 is actually noticeable.

Over the last few months, I've often been found burning the midnight oil, reinstalling my PC from scratch in the middle of the night in order to find the perfect OS for my usage habits. Basically, I use my PC for a variety of work purposes; from traditional word processing and desktop publishing, to virtualising several server OS' concurrently; testing solutions, tools and ideas. Once the work day is done, I'll often kick back into gaming mode, where I like immerse myself into the latest 3D graphics and positional audio as I blast my way through some foreign landscape.

Vista x86 (32-bit) was pretty good to me, although I had gaming problems caused largely by the new audio processing layer in Vista (google for "audiodg.exe high CPU usage"), coupled with poor drivers from audio card/chipset manufacturers (and cheap sound cards - but more on this another time). Also, Vista x86 would only see around 3GB of my 4GB RAM (my motherboard BIOS successfully remaps system memory around reserved PCIe resources, but places it in a range that x86 operating systems can't get to), a common problem on newer systems.

Realising I couldn't attain the overall experience I required from Vista x86, I rolled back to XP (also the 32-bit version). The first thing that became evident was the speed increase. The lack of eye-candy certainly made XP feel snappier, and while it didn't seem to handle multiple simultaneous tasks as slickly as the Vista kernel, the overall experience was certainly speedier. Gaming was back to a predictable level and most other things were working as desired, except for the fact that I was still missing a GB of RAM. This RAM shortage was not really a problem, until I wanted to add that extra virtual machine... damn!

After an extensive backup procedure (and a pre-migration using the XP version of Windows Easy transfer), I formatted my hard disk and installed Vista x64, initially unsure of what to expect. The first surprise was the performance, in that it didn't feel significantly slower than the XP installation it just replaced. This was alarming (but certainly welcomed), given the change from Vista x86 to XP yielded a significant increase. I googled around the place to reveal some independent test results suggesting that in typical use; Vista x64 is around 10% faster than x86. So far, I'd agree wholeheartedly.

From doing some research beforehand, I knew that Vista x64 was very fussy about drivers (all device drivers MUST be 64-bit, and MUST be signed). I had pre-qualified all my hardware by checking vendor websites for Vista x64 drivers, and read through a variety of newsgroups to verify device functionality from a users' perspective. The only thing I've had to discard is a 5 year-old webcam that I rarely used, so no great loss there. What I couldn't determine from reading reviews was what performance to expect from my personal collection of existing 32-bit applications. To my surprise, everything that I've installed so far has run seamlessly, completely oblivious to its x64 host environment. In fact, the only hint that the applications aren't running natively is the *32 alongside certain process names in the Windows Task Manager.

While I'm still suffering the gaming problems I experienced under Vista x86, a new sound card (which is on it's way) should see that sorted once and for all, leaving me with one slick machine. Overall, I think I've finally found OS nirvana, or as close as I can get while still living under Bill's regime...