The Chatterbox

Getting Windows XP x64 (64 bit) to work

As some of you know, recently I've been playing with switching my main system over from Windows XP Pro, the 32 bit version, to Windows XP Pro x64, the 64 bit version. The reason behind my testing this is that every version of Windows 32 bit software limits you to a maximum of 3 Gigs of usable RAM memory. You can stick as much RAM in your system as you want, assuming your motherboard supports it, and Windows doesn't care.

Technically speaking, Windows XP Pro will tell you that it supports up to 4 gigs of RAM. However even if you stick in only 4 gigs if RAM, which is not all that out of line in these days of high end graphic applications, Windows will keep you from using that last gig. They set that aside for PCI, without ever looking to see if your PCI cards have their own onboard memory.

It's silly. But I think I understand way. My guess is that with the networking capabilities of XP Pro they're afraid people will buy it and use it to run servers instead of running a true Server version of Microsoft software. Whatever the reason, I think it's silly. Bordering on stupid.

So I decided to take on trying to install XP Pro x64, which has a maximum supported RAM figure of a whopping 128 gigs. (I'm not even going to try to explain that one. Makes no sense at all!)

I did have a choice of trying to move to Vista x64, which might be wise since XP is bound to be coming up on its EOL or End of Life cycle. But I've heard enough bad things about Vista that I don't want to make that leap. At least not with my main computer.

So... To make sure I was reasonably ready I had a new motherboard installed in my computer (the old one would only handle up to 4 gigs and I wanted more) and purchased another couple of 2 gig ram sticks that matched up with my other ram sticks.

The issue with changing things to x64 is the general lack of driver support for hardware. It's not that widely used yet so finding the right drivers can be troublesome according to everything I'd read and heard.

I got lucky in this because I was putting in a new Intel (model DG965SS) motherboard, and Intel does have x64 driver support. Other than this one rather major item, the only other things I had to sort out were drivers for my ATI x1300 Dual Monitor graphics card and my Linksys Wireless-G ethernet card.

The ATI card was a piece of cake. They also had an x64 driver set available. The only issue I ran into when installing it was that the default .NET version on my XP Pro x64 disk wasn't up to snuff with what ATI wanted. Quick fix on that one, assuming one could get internet connectivity.

The Linksys Wireless-G ethernet driver was a bit more challenging. I couldn't find where Linksys has 64 bit drivers at all. But lo and behold I figured out that Linksys uses either Broadcom or Ralink drivers for my version of the wireless ethernet card, depending upon when it was manufactured. Mine was a Ralink chipset, but it wouldn't have mattered since both Ralink and Broadcom provide 64 bit drivers for these cards.

I had done most of my research before I started, so didn't have too many unexpected problems. In all it took me about 24 hours between other work to get the x64 sorted and running. The way I did it was to install XP Pro x64, then installed all of the Intel updates that I'd previously downloaded (with crappy graphics since I didn't have the ATI stuff installed yet), the moved on to the ATI card drivers I'd already downloaded and lastly the NIC card drivers from Ralink.

After all of that was done I let the computer do its upgrades from Microsoft, rebooting and re-updating after each one until there were no more critical or necessary updates waiting for me. Seriously, in my case it was all pretty painless, though others have told horror stories. I would imagine preparation was 99% of the reason I had an easier time of it.

The other thing that probably made it easier for me was in how I was doing the upgrade, or really testing things. You see I have SATA hard drives in the computer now, which was one of the side advantages of replacing my motherboard. Unlike IDE hard drives where you have to set the switches to tell the computer which is the master and which is the slave, with SATA you simply hook 'em up and go. Then you can go into your BIOS and set the boot order.

So while I may call it a dual boot system, it's not in the traditional sense. Instead I have two totally different systems, with XP Pro (32 bit) installed on one 250 gig Western Digital drive and XP Pro x64 installed on a separate 250 gig Western Digital drive. I can toggle back and forth between which boots by making a quick change in my BIOS boot order.

If you can do it this way I'd definitely suggest doing it this way. Not only does this approach save you some heartache when you need to go back to x32 to grab another driver like I had to, since they're completely separate you don't have to worry nearly as much about messing something up.

At the end of the day the only things I couldn't get working properly were an older version of Acronis' True Image backup software (I had version 8 from a year or so back) that simply doesn't support x64 at all. However for a $30 upgrade I moved up a couple of versions and it's now supported. According to their docs Acronis started supporting 64 bit apps during their version 9. I just upgraded to 10 to be sure.

The only thing I never got working at all was Computer Associates Anti-Virus suite. They tell me they don't have a solution currently, period end of discussion. I saw some posts in various places about disabling Floppy scanning in CA/AV, but that didn't work for me. I still couldn't get realtime scanning to work. Support told me they had no solution to the problem.

No biggie. I've got multiple computers and a multi-computer license with CA, so the license can always be used somewhere. And Avast! has a 64 bit version of their anti-virus software that works just fine for me.

All of my other software worked just fine in x64. This includes Office, Powerpoint, Excel, PhotoImpact, PhotoShop, Acrobat Pro, Putty my SSH software to talk to the servers, WSFTP, etc, etc. They all work flawlessly, I suspect because of x64's WOW module that runs 32 bit apps.

I did have to also make a couple of small registry tweaks to get x64 working as well as I thought it should with 6 gigs of RAM, however I'm not sure if those were because of my specific system configuration or if it's a general thing everyone should do. The only time I noticed a problem was after XP came back from being in screensaver mode, so my performance improvement may have come from me simply changing some configs so that nothing goes into standby or hibernation when the screen saver is activated.

In any event if you try this and need the registry tweaks you can find the same documents I used by searching Google for something like "speed up xp x64"

Next up, I'm going to be playing with installing a Desktop Linux OS on a third drive. Hey, I have 4 SATA ports on the motherboard and want to test one against the other in my everyday working environment. And hard drives are cheap these days. So I'm going to keep them all separate.

I think I'm going to try Ubuntu Linux, but my first (quick) attempts have run into problems. Ubuntu doesn't even want to fully install on my system, so something is throwing it for a loop. I'm not sure if that's my graphics card (the ATI is supposedly a problem child with Ubuntu), my Wireless ethernet card or something else. I mention the wireless card because Ubuntu looks for network stuff during it's initial setup. But because my wireless network is WEP password protected it'll never be able to connect to the network until I can give it a keyphrase, which it never does during the install. I'm not even positive that it's detecting the wireles card though. It may be looking for a network via the wired cat5 port on my motherboard.

Anyway, that'll be next up. I haven't had much time to dig into it yet. Just tried a couple of quick installs and they failed.

If I get it working though it'll be a good thing. I'll be able to compare the performance of one OS against another easily since they'll each be fully enclosed on their own hard drive, and I'll be able to swtich back and forth pretty easily via BIOS. Though I must admit I can't recall of anybody ever having a Tri-boot system before. LOL

Until next time...

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