DescentBB

I was planning on using my winxp OS in new comp. Only problem is it is limited to something just under 4 gig of ram. Is there any advantage to getting Vista 64 bit just to get the extra half gig of ram from the corsair paired 2 gig sticks but then put up with the memory hog-id-ness of Vista?

My brother has Vista 64 (Business) on 4 gigs and it is as responsive as XP once you turn off the excess crap. There is no major advantage to getting Vista 64 on a midrange computer, but an ultra high end computer for newer title gaming there are some advantages of being a little more future proof. If you aren't planning on picking up any new games, there isn't much reason to go with Vista in any flavor, or to exceed 4 GB of RAM. In a 32 bit Windows OS you will be limited to around 3.2 GB of memory reported, but the whole 4 GB is there and usable.

Try it. Uninstalling most of the crap that comes with it and disabling every service you can should give you an OS that's tolerable. Vista ran fine on a low budget but pretty strong laptop.

Otherwise, if you aren't going to use all 4gb, then having a 3.5 limit isn't really a big deal. I have 2gb in my desktop client, and with .net studio, sqlserver client, and other misc stuff, I don't come close to full memory.

OK, so I go with my existing XPpro. Vista is supposed to be replaced by what? Win 2008? Will the NTSF 32 bit winxp be upgradable to 64 bit NTSF I would think win 2008 will probably have? Maybe I'm looking too far down the road but some of you here probably more about win 2008 than I do.

Hmmm...maybe it is win7 I am thinking about. Seems it may be another year before it is out.

And another two years of patches.

it is as responsive as XP once you turn off the excess crap...

Test, Krom, can you provide a list or site that is comprehensive in this task? I could google it, but there would be pages of garbage to wade through and I'm sure much of it is not hit or miss.

Thx

I'm not entirely sure what my brother disabled on his box, but I went along and killed all the standard animations windows has (same thing I do in XP) and killed aero/themes.

If you want to make any version of windows seem faster without actually doing anything, go into system properties/advanced and push the performance button, in visual effects turn off everything that animates or slides and general windows usage will be faster. The rest of my brothers rig keeping pace was because it is a quad core 2.66 GHz Intel with 4 GB of RAM, pretty hard for that in good condition to not keep up with a lesser system running XP.

My dad just purchased an HP media PC with an AMD X2 2.6GHz with 4GB RAM and Vista 64-bit. It's a litte speed demon even with the Aero interface turned on.

I use a Lenovo R61u @ work with a Core 2 Duo T8300 (2.4GHz), 2GB 667MHz DDR RAM and Vista 32-bit, and it even pumps out great performance with all the bells and whistles on. I've really warmed up to Vista, it is leaps and bounds better now than it was @ launch.

Still p1mping XP @ home.

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There are probably more tweaks I could do, but I simply made sure Aero was disabled, turned off some window animations, and turned off the file indexing. After that, Vista 32-bit ran just as well as XP on my old P4 2.8GHz w/ 2Gb RAM.

OOOOoooo thanks Spooky. Last I saw viper's site was down.

Loading winxp now. After a hour and a half it has 30% of the terabyte hard drive formatted.

Seriously... use quick format next time, on a new hard drive it gets the job done just as well, but in only 15 seconds.

Now you tell me

Oh well, it might turn out for the best anyway since I've heard of a few bad runs of 1 TB drives out there with high failure rates. If the drive has a problem a complete format is more likely to expose it before you spend a lot of time and effort loading stuff on a defective drive.

I'll do a SiSoft Sandra on the drive after I get windows to load

Curious, I OC'd the CPU and in Bios it says it is running at 3.3 gig. Now that I finally have winxp loaded and go into system info, it says each core is at 3.7 gig. Anyone know why the difference?

http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php
Find out what your real clock speed is, what windows reports is sometimes not even close to accurate, BIOS is usually better but not always correct.

Also if you are planning on overclocking for a long time get yourself some torture test applications to make sure you are at a stable overclock such as the latest multicore superprime which can be found here: http://sp2004.fre3.com/beta/beta2.htm

Note that people don't call a system \"stable\" till it can run super prime without a single error for over 24 hours solid without a single break. If super prime does have problems, odds are your CPU is getting too hot from insufficient cooling or is simply beyond what is possible with your specific chip or you need to increase the voltage. To fix it you can lower the clock speed to a setting where the chip is stable or you can buy improved cooling that can keep the chip cool enough for the system to be stable or you can increase the voltage beyond defaults. The first two options are obviously safe options and the better cooling option might even be on the menu without overclocking, but the third option is where things start to get dangerous, increasing the voltage too much can kill a CPU sometimes alarmingly fast.

woodchip wrote:Will the NTSF 32 bit winxp be upgradable to 64 bit NTSF I would think win 2008 will probably have?

What is NTSF?

NT Sucky Format.

NTSF is a file system where you can use hard drives larger than 32 gig. Winxp gives you a choice of which to install.

Right.

It was originally a NT format, but when XP was created the old \"FAT\" system was replaced with NTFS. Windows used a FAT 16 for 95 and FAT 32 for 98. NT was a 32 bit file system but for mostly things like server control and programmers.

Incidently, you could play Descent on Nt, but without sound as there were no NT sound drivers then.

I thought \"32\" was the bit rate not the drive size.

P.S. NTFS = \"New Technology File System\"

woodchip wrote:NTSF is a file system where you can use hard drives larger than 32 gig. Winxp gives you a choice of which to install.

Ahh, ok. You mean NTFS? I was wondering if that's what you meant. I didn't know there was a 32 bit version and a 64 bit version? I never knew there was such a thing for filesystem formats either, nor did I think it mattered.

Its N.T.F.S.(new technology filing system):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS

Theftbot wrote:Its N.T.F.S.(new technology filing system):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS

Yes I think we have established that

haha like d0h

Sorry about the letters being slightly rearranged. Also so you know, 64 bit systems allow ram memory to be larger than 4 gigs.

woodchip wrote:Sorry about the letters being slightly rearranged. Also so you know, 64 bit systems allow ram memory to be larger than 4 gigs.

hard drives have been larger than 4 gigs for a long time...

fliptw wrote: hard drives have been larger than 4 gigs for a long time...

I think this topic has the NTFS filesystem mixed up with the 3.5gig RAM limit of XP. Both are two entirely different subjects.

thats what i was wondering, what does NTFS have anything to do with 64bit environments other than being the native file system?

fliptw wrote:

woodchip wrote:Sorry about the letters being slightly rearranged. Also so you know, 64 bit systems allow ram memory to be larger than 4 gigs.

hard drives have been larger than 4 gigs for a long time...

Ram Memory is not a hard drive.

woodchip wrote:

fliptw wrote:

woodchip wrote:Sorry about the letters being slightly rearranged. Also so you know, 64 bit systems allow ram memory to be larger than 4 gigs.

hard drives have been larger than 4 gigs for a long time...

Ram Memory is not a hard drive.

Exactly. That's why NTFS has nothing to do with RAM at all.

I got XP64bit cause of the 3gb ram limit and I like it a lot more then just plane XP.

But XP64 is a totaly differnt then Vista64 when it comes to the 64 bit kernal. Iirc vistas is called true 64 but I can't rember

Actually, the limit is 3.12 GB =)

Actually, the limit depends on your hardware.

Yes, it varies depending on the hardware but usually (but not always) lands somewhere within 3.0 to 3.4 GB reported by the system. Although that isn't to say the remaining memory is unusable, I'm not sure the actual limitation but software can use the remaining memory but from what I've heard it can only be used by a single application at a time and it has to allocate the whole thing at once.

Windows grabs about one Gig for a virtual machine on bootup. Your 4 gigs is being used but is reported incorrectly. Windows lies.