Geoff Goes 64 Bit: What I've Learned So Far
As I alluded to in my last post, I'm building a new computer this week. The bits did indeed arrive (yesterday) and I've used up quite a lot of my spare time putting it together and installing it.
First, here's the hardware that I put together:
- Motherboard: The Gigabyte GA-M55SLI-S4. I actually order the GA-M57SLI-S4, but the shop couldn't get them in for a few weeks - and really, there's not that big a different. As with all hardware I've ever got from Gigabyte, there was no issues with it, and the manual was easy enough to follow that I could work out where all the connectors were and what to hook them up to.
- CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+. So far so good . I've installed just the stock fan that came with it rather than buying something flash, and it hasn't melted yet :)
- RAM: 2GB DDR5400 (667MHz), paired over 2x1G.
- HDD: Seagate 320GB SATA2. Works a treat, nice and fast :)
- Video: The LeadTek WinFast PX7600 GS TDH Classic Edition. It's not quite what I thought I ordered (the picture I went from when I ordered it had two DVI ports, whereas this one has one DVI and one VGA), but it's still good nonetheless. Check out the picture on the product page - I've got the version with the massive heatsink and copoer tubing. Tis sweet!
- Printer: I picked up a really cheap bargain - the Canon Pixma MP450. It's working well so far, but I only took it out of it's box this afternoon :)
- Monitor: The BenQ FP91G+ was going cheap, so I grabbed one. It's a 19 inch LCD that seems pretty nice so far. I only which it had a higher res than 1280x1024 - but it's ok :)
- Network: Although there's onboard LAN on the motherboard, my house is actually wireless, so I got a NetGear WG311. I already had one in my old PC that worked fine, and it's really cheap too.
On top of that, I pulled my 200GB IDe drive out of my old computer, and the DVD burner that was in it too. The case I picked up at the local computer markets - seems to be nice and quiet.
The assembly all went fine, except for one little cable. The SATA HDD uses the new style SATA power connector, but the case I bought only had the normal type. A quick walk down the local shops got me what I needed - an adapter to power it :)
Once it was assembled, it was just an easy matter of installing the OS and the apps I need, right? Well, not so easy. I didn't really think about it - I just went ahead and installed the 64 bit edition of Windows XP. As it was installing, I recalled that perhaps there might be issues with drivers - I remember reading about how a lot of hardware manufacturers aren't bothering to spend much time (if any) on 64 bit driver development.
Normal applications are fine - XP64 will happily run 32bit apps, but the drivers MUST be 64bit. So once I had an OS, I looked at what drivers I needed.
Motherboard: Easy - it's a 64bit mobo, and gigabyte are a decent company. Of course they provide 64bit drivers for all the things on their board. So that covered everything except the video card and the wireless card, the mouse and keyboard.
Both the mouse and the keyboard that I use are Microsoft ones, so that was simple. Both IntelliPoint and IntelliType come in x64 flavours.
The video card was fine. Although the disk that came with it didn't work, I knew I could get decent drivers for it from the nvidia website. But how can I download them when I've got no wireless support? I gave up in the end and plugged in a proper network cable and went online. So that sorted out the video card.
It was at about this stage I had a panic attack. I've just bought a printer - is that going to work? I searched google and saw a lot of people complaing about lack of 64bit support for printers. Luckily, Canon isn't one of them, so I found a 64bit driver the printer without issue.
The wireless card was a problem. NetGear have stated that not only do they not support 64bit XP, they also claim that almost no-one does, and so it's really not worth the risk of running 64bit XP at all. Bastards. This is pretty rich considering it's the only driver I have a problem with.
A friend of mine has also gone wireles. He's gone with the just-as-cheap D-Link DWL-G511. I wondered - and yep, DLink aren't supporting x64 either.
A lot of searching later and I cracked it. The DLink card that my friend is using happens to use the same chipset as a card made by RALink. They do support x64 - and guy over at planetAMD64 hacked their driver to accept the DLink card too :) He's packaged it up for download of the planetAMD64 site, but I can't link to it because you need to register (for free) to access the downloads. There's a double bonus here too: I've also installed on a seperate partition the x^$ version of Vista Beta 2 (there was only an x86 version of the August CTP). The same network drivers worked under Vista!
So I swapped my NetGear card for his DLink (which doesn't effect him since he's still in 32bit land :) and it's all sorted!
While XP64 will run 32 apps, some work better than others. In the course of installing other applications, learned tow main things.
- AVG AnitVirus is free only for 32bit platforms. You have to pay to go 64 :( Avast, however, are free in the 64bit world :) I do prefer AVG, but free is free *nods*
- Winzip works fine, but the right-click explorer shell extensions don't work - the shell is 64bit, so 32bit shell extensions just won't work.
- SQL Server 2000 is only supported on 64bit platforms if you install SP4. Given that I was going to install it anyway, that's no big deal :)
Everything just seems to work. I'm sure more things will come up as time goes on, but there's nothing that seems to be a deal breaker. Yet :)