Weighing the 64bit plunge... constructive input sought

[Blorton]

(Please no Vista bashing.)

I've crawled through old posts and scanned the wiki, and am not seeing a significant amount of information on this one.

Putting aside any issues one might have with Vista64 itself, I'm seeing a few things that make it look worth finally leaving XP32 for:

1) Symlinks - along with improved fetching, this should play well with hard drive caches to improve overall load times. Anyone see that in reality?
2) Multiple monitors can be different sizes without issues. So slaves can be on one or more cheap lcd's rather than having to buy a matching big widescreen in my case.(Love the Dell 24" tho..)
3) Actually having all 4Gigs of memory I paid for be usable. >snicker<

So I'd be game to try XP64, but the symlink and video thing sure look like standouts to me.

Can anyone who has tried them both please share their experiences? I'm on a kickbutt Q6600 buildup, so performance shouldn't be a factor either way.

Thanks!
Blorton

[Kissell13]

I use vista pro 64 bit and have absolutely no issues. I believe that they may hive fixed many of the problems that vista had. Way back at vista's release I tried the Os and had horrible results. Upon intalling it on my new rig i have encounter no problems.

As far as the symlinks go I cannot tell you. I use 2 physical copies of wow on the same hdd. 1 install for my main and the other install for my 4 alts. I get load times of around 15 seconds for all 5 to load. Im not sure if its faster for people using symlinks but I have found that it is not necessary for my setup.

Multi-monitors work as intended on Vista 64. I have a 27in and 22in monitors and everything worked as it should with no problems.

[daviddoran]

I use vista x64 as well with no problems, other than I couldn't get VENT to work, but my install is less than ideal (switched motherboards/chipsets, didn't do a full reinstall just drivers)

I have 8gb of ram, mostly because it was cheap. I overclocked my q6600 to 3.3GHZ, and I have 4 monitors, one being a 37" 1080P LCD (just plain AWESOME for wow) and 2 17"s, and an old 15". I have 2 8800 video cards, and was thinking about getting a PCI or a PCIe x1 card so I can get one more screen, so I don't have 2 "doubling up" or I may just upgrade one to a widescreen, so they have more room to share. I first had em quartered on one 17" screen, but compared to a 37", 1/4 of a 17" was just too small, so I tore apart my second gaming rig and stole its video card and monitors

[brandonbwt]

I'm running Vista Ultimate 64-bit and (for the most part) haven't had any problems with regards to program execution (e.g. Vent, WoW, etc) or anything like that. I will admit that before SP1 there were some strange hangs from time to time, but the overall experience has been pretty solid and stable. I normally run 5 clients on the same machine, with each core of the processor (QX6600 OC'd to 3.0Ghz) handling a single client and two clients on the first core.

The 8GB of RAM is nice, as well as the built-in support for dual monitors. I run a 24" for my main and 20" divided into 4 800x600 sections for my slave toons and haven't ever had a single problem with them (nor during the setup/config process).