I’ve just finished six months of dual booting my PC with Windows XP Professional and Windows Vista Ultimate x64 (the 64 bit version of Windows). Please peruse my initial installation here if you haven’t already before continuing.
Let me start by confirming I am still dual booting, but mainly because Vista x64 isn’t supported by the Connector software from Windows Home Server. If I want my PC backed up I have to go into a 32 bit operating system to get it done. A 64 bit version of this was to be available this month but the Windows Home Server team is furiously working on the data corruption bug, which (knock wood) hasn’t affected me. Every few days I boot into XP and let it back up.
The second reason I boot back into Windows XP is because of Nvidia’s Vista x64 drivers. I have a Geforce 8800GTX graphics card, which was top of the line until a few weeks ago. After a few hours of game playing (mostly Company Of Heroes) the graphics driver crashes, the game screen goes black and Vista tells me the graphics driver has crashed but Vista has recovered. Everything else works fine but I have to close the game. If I want to play anything after that I have to reboot, and at that point I’m frustrated with Vista so I boot into XP and play games for days without a hiccup.
The last drivers for Vista from Nvidia for the 8800 series were released December 20th 2007. I realize the 9000 series of cards are now out but I’d still like to see a quarterly driver update!
Service pack 1 installed and on restart gave me a BSOD: I rebooted and everything has been fine since. Can’t say I see any improvement, but nothing negative has popped up either.
Power saving and power features in Vista are far superior to XP: I have my PC go to standby after ten minutes and it works flawlessly every time, and I’ve never had an issue coming out of standby. I like leaving my machine on all the time but have been feeling guilty about the power usage so this is my compromise for the time being.
Everything else about Vista x64 just works. I don’t do a lot on the machine other than email, web browsing and game playing, but isn’t that what home computers are for?
