Ken B. said:
Yes I was going to go for the 64-bit version of vista ultimate but my pc
parts sales guy told me to go with the 32-bit version as the 64-bit just
isnt
being supported yet very well by many companies for drivers etc. etc. He
has
had many disappointed cuwstomers that told him they wished they would have
went with the 32-bit instead of the 64-bit version.
In your case it might've been a better investment to just buy the retail
version of Ultimate, as it contains both the 32-bit and the 64-bit versions
on separate DVDs, so that you can install either--or even both, as I did at
home (but the 64-bit version requires a 64-bit cpu and won't run on 32-bit
cpus like P4's and Celerons.) I run an Athlon 64 at home, and I did an
in-place upgrade of XP Pro on my primary boot partition, and a clean install
of Ultimate x64 on my secondary boot partition, so that I can boot to either
OS at will. Right now, all of my devices are working fine on both x64 and
x32, including my new x1950 Pro AGP 3d card from ATi and my Creative Labs
x-Fi sound card (albeit the x32 betas from Creative function better there
they they do under x64--but Creative says it's releasing a formal driver set
for both at the end of March '07.)
Every time we begin the migration to a newer set of standards we hear the
same old nay saying about doing it...
I remember with much amusement
reading a few "pundit" columns back in late 1995 that absolutely lambasted
Win95 while wholeheartedly (if you can believe it) recommending that
"everyone" would just be "so much better off" sticking with Win3.1...
What was so funny about reading that at the time was that these people
should have known better, but didn't...
They might've been slow to catch
on but by 1996 all of these pundits were singing an entirely different tune,
IIRC.
People like to, for some reason, throw off on the fact that that device OEMs
are slow to implement drivers for new, popular OS releases, as if somehow
that was the fault of the OS and the company selling the OS. It's not, of
course--it's the fault of the company that made the device which you
bought--it's their responsibility to support the hardware you buy, and
there's only so much hand-holding that Microsoft can do along the way.
Microsoft has done a great deal of pre-release vendor hand-holding for
Vista, so it's a sure thing that Vista surprised absolutely nobody in this
regard. That's exactly why when I buy hardware peripherals I choose only
those manufactured by tier-1 companies with high public profiles who have a
good record of supporting the products they sell with drivers. Doing this
will cost you more than going cheap with no-name or brand spin-off products,
to be sure. But in the long run you'll be much happier having done it when
you get around to installing that new OS you just bought, and when you want
to see support for your devices improved and continued over a decent span of
time.
