Ive decided im going to buy Vista at the end of the month and cant decide which one to buy.

Vista Home Premium 32Bit OEM
Vista Home Premium 64Bit OEM
Vista Ultimate 32Bit OEM
Vista Ultimate 64Bit OEM

Cant decide if i should bother with Ultimate over Home Premium and whether or not i should go 32bit or 64bit , have 64bit drivers improved all that much yet or are they still utter crap.

Whats your opinions ?

Hi,

what will you do with your pc?
Ultimate has more function like home premium but is more expensive. So you have to make a choice which function you need and which not. You can have a look at Vista Business too. So first look which features you realy need and then look which version you need.
32 Bit or 64Bit good Question at the moment there are a few application that use 64 bit, but i think the 64 bit is the better choice, most 32 bit Application will run under 64 Bit but not in the other way.

so long

darph

I do lots of gaming, video encoding aswell as quite alot of other multimedia stuff. Ill have to check out driver support for a couple of new parts im getting for my rig soon, dont wanna fork out a load of cash on mobo, cpu, gpu only to discover crap driver support for 64bit.

Here is a decent side by side of the various parts and pieces

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/products/...ons/choose.mspx

as far as 64bit vs 32bit. It really depends on the amount of memory and if there are any 64 bits apps you want to use. I'm currently using 64bit but I have 8gb of ram (really overkill with the current applications that I use) 64 bit drivers seem OK at best. I've been having problems with Creative and now apparently Nvidia network controller drivers.

Your milleage may vary though

I completely forgot about the limitation of 32bit with 4GB of memory, that just made my choice a whole lot easier because i will put a 4GB matched set of ram in soon

I think i will go with Home Premium because i dont need any of those extra features because i already have True Image and use VNC for remote desktop and im not paranoid or stupid enough to need BitLocker.

Not going to buy OEM anymore after reading their crappy a*s Agreement, I swap my hardware out every 4-5months so it would be pointless and Vista sure as hell aint worth £195 of my hard earned cash to buy the retail.

I thought 32bit was limited to 2 gigs.. After that it starts lie-ing about how much ram you have, "I think" If not someone correct me on this please?

the most it can address is 3GB of memory

You would think Vista being the latest available windows os that it could keep up with the mobo's?

it's not about motherboards. It's about limitations of addressing memory with the memory space with 32bit. 64bit vista has no problems with adressing up to 128gb of memory.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929605/en-us

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929580/en-us

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/940105/en-us This article really just talks about 32bit game development on windows. but the slice that's of interest here is



Just some food for thought. 4GB of memory isn't new and Windows XP, Windows Server 2000 and 2003 have been able to cope with this before 64bit came onto the scene for these os's. But it's a matter of fact that for any application to take advantage of lots of memory in the 32bit world needs to be specifically designed to do so. For example SQL server can do this. If you want a lot of memory for free (no dev intervention) then 64bit is how you need to compile your application.

No, that's virtual address space, the virtual address range a process can address (2GB by default, 3GB when your boot configuration includes the /3GB option). This has absolutely NOTHING to do with physical RAM at all, and should not be confused with it. The most physical RAM a 32bit version of Vista can address is 4GB (minus any memory reserved by the BIOS during boot).

On a side note, 32bit server versions of Windows can address more than 4GB if /PAE is used, but the OS doesn't use it, and only applications compiled a specific way and that include code for doing their own memory management when compiled can access and use the physical RAM above 4GB via the AWE (Address Windowing Extension) API set - and even then, the OS doesn't do memory management of any memory mapped into the AWE window, the application is responsible completely for management of this mapped view of RAM above 4GB.

I'll stop my tangent and point you here - visit the links there before doing anything else. I think a few of you are a little confused about RAM and virtual address space, so hopefully this will educate you further so you'll understand this better and make a more informed decision. If you really want to learn more about memory management in Windows (and a whole lot of other useful info about the platform), consider Windows Internals, 4th Edition, specifically chapter 7 on memory management. It's not what I'd call an easy read, but it's *the source* for this kind of info.


Anyway, to answer the OP's question, you need to do some research before going 64bit - check the hardware you plan on using and see if it's on the x64 Vista HCL. If you find that some of your planned hardware devices are not listed here, check the vendor's site for Vista x64 drivers. If you still find devices that aren't listed, consider 32bit - 64bit really is problematic if you don't have drivers (just like 32bit would be in the same scenario), and you should definitely go 32bit in this scenario. However, if all of your planned hardware has 64bit drivers, either from the vendor or on the Vista disc itself (via the HCL), start checking apps you plan on using to make sure they'll either work in x64 in 32bit mode, or have an x64 version you can run. Again, if you find that your apps are not going to run on Vista x64, use 32bit.

If you have drivers for your hardware, and x64 software (or compatible with the x64 environment in 32bit mode), 64bit is a really great environment to work in and quite a few of us have gone entirely 64bit (myself included).

64bit is wonderful IMO. A bit more stable and a bit faster than 32bit. I'm just glad that everything I use works perfectly with 64bit (XP x64; I won't touch Vista with a 10 foot pole).

@Shoguy...Quote:it's not about motherboards. It's about limitations of addressing memory with the memory space with 32bit. 64bit vista has no problems with adressing up to 128gb of memory.

Settle down ...no need to be so anal on the subject.

I hate Vista. After using it for so many months of getting it to dual boot and learning the OS and the way it works in terms of installing etc, I've learned I'm more productive on XP.

I'm dual booting the two but I don't even bother booting Vista anymore. It's just taking up space on one of my partition.

Sorry, I know it doesn't answer your question, but I think you should stick with XP unless Vista comes preloaded on a laptop/desktop you are buying.

Didn't realize I was being anal about it. Just pointing out that the issue wasn't Vista motherboard support. That's all.

Witch Vista? NONE.
Unless you are masochists and want all the DRM crap, limits and tiltbites. But if you are, well, you probably enjoy it a lot! Have fun!

Don't mind articles like this:
http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html

While he makes some good points (about content "protection" and encryption), he needs a tinfoil hat and to place the blame where it belongs - the US congress and the xxAA groups who mandate this nonsense or else companies cannot carry their "content". Most of what he complains of is regarding signed drivers (which, unlike his contention, I feel is GOOD for the industry as vendors are less able to let crappy drivers out into the wild, and are forced to fix them quickly when they do) and the behaviors of WGA/SPP. Again, some good points, but mostly just tinfoil hat.

If your 64bit ready, then get 64bit.
I would get Ultimate if I was you.
The 32bit version is great too so I dunno.
If your gonna buy a mustang, always get the V8.

I havent seen any DRM crap as of 2 years running Vista........

Ultimate lets you run Virtual Machines while Home premium does not.
Go with the retail version of Ultimate if you can't decide which platform to choose.
It's expensive, but if you think about it.
2 OEM 32 and 64 is $400
1 retail with both 32 and 64bit DVD is still $400

And as for this 4GB limitation on a 32bit system.
Some system cannnot detect up to 4Gb is because of chipset limitations.
e.g. Intel 945 supports up to 4GB, but if you install 4 1GB rams then the
bios will allocated the ram thus leaving you with only 3.2GB no matter which OS
you use 32bit or 64bit.