I have been wanting to upgrade to Windows Vista 64 from (Vista 32) bit for quite some time now, but just haven’t found the time to do it, until now. The Christmas Holidays are upon us and come Friday evening, I decided to take the jump.
I backed up any crucial data to my raft of external hard drives and threw the Vista 64 DVD in to the PC. I planned to format C:\ and install the OS there. Since I have my programs stored there, I would be required to reinstall those too. Vista x64 doesn’t run 16bit code at all, so my existing 16bit programs would have to run on XP via Virtual PC 2007. Virtualization ftw!
The OS installed fine and actually felt a lot smoother than x32. Browsing was much noticeably faster and scrolling through CoverFlow on iTunes was extremely fast and smooth, rather than sluggish. Things were going along perfectly - until I switched on my five external hard drives. They all powered up and worked perfectly but then two of them, both
Western Digital MyBook’s (connected via Firewire) would randomly switch off and the only way to get them to power back up was to reboot Vista. It was like there was a power saving feature in effect, but I’d already disabled that. Then my three other external hard disks began behaving erratically. Sometimes I could access them, and on other occasions I couldn’t, which made Explorer lock up horribly bringing the entire OS down - something that I couldn’t even manage to do in Vista x32.
My last issue was not with Vista, but with Canon. I have two Canon printers, and didn’t even check their website for 64bit drivers before deciding to move to x64. They are so good with driver releases that I naturally expected them to have them already out. They weren’t…. Given that Vista x64 has been out for the same length of time as x32 I had been hoping that driver manufacturers had got their act together with regards to releasing 32 and 64bit drivers however it is just too slow.
I did some reading up on various forums and quite a lot of users have got no problem with x64, which is good news. However it still remains that Vista x64 needs more pace on the device driver front. If Canon don’t release 64bit drivers then I’ve got no choice but to avoid their printers in future - something that I won’t enjoy as I’ve always used Canon printers.
Other than the two issues I have, Vista x64 was really good. I noticed some speed improvements and smoother Aero interface use. However when I can’t use my printers in the OS, the whole point of upgrading from x32 becomes irrelevant. I will wait for Service Pack 1, due in early 2008 before trying out the OS again but I seriously hope Canon get some x64 drivers out because that is what the OS really needs - better 64bit device drivers and fast.
