XP 64bit eval RC2 now available

[Michael Paul]

Microsoft has now released RC2 (build 1433) of its XP 64bit demo.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/64bit/evaluation/upgrade.mspx

Michael

 

[J.Venning]

Microsoft has now released RC2 (build 1433) of its XP 64bit demo.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/64bit/evaluation/upgrade.mspx
Michael

Would you advise me to give this a try as well? I've oredered and paid
for a Linux x86 64bit DVDs, and hope that I will be able to use it.
J.

 

[Michael Paul]

Am Wed, 16 Feb 2005 22:05:24 +0100 schrieb J.Venning:

Hi,

Would you advise me to give this a try as well? I've oredered and paid
for a Linux x86 64bit DVDs, and hope that I will be able to use it.

Well, it's exactly the same procedure as with RC1:
Registering (seems to be useful to check"please notify me")
Downloading the .ISO
Burning a CD (you should try to associate .ISO files to your CD burning
software)
Boot and install.

I've oredered and paid
for a Linux x86 64bit DVDs, and hope that I will be able to use it.

What distribution? I hope that it is Suse, for they have a fine manual in
the package.
In order to get into first contact with linux a live CD like Knoppix would
be the better solution.

But if you really want to learn, a distribution that is installed on the
HDD isn't the worst thin;-)

greets,
Michael

 

[Michael Paul]

Am Wed, 16 Feb 2005 22:05:24 +0100 schrieb J.Venning:

Would you advise me to give this a try as well?

Sorry, I had totally misunderstood your question.

I think, there won't be a big difference to RC1. Some 100 bugs are fixed.
But you will still miss drivers and applications.

So I would suggest to try linux.

Greets,
Michael

 

[J.Venning]

I think, there won't be a big difference to RC1. Some 100 bugs are fixed.
But you will still miss drivers and applications.
So I would suggest to try linux.
Greets,
Michael

Well, I'm in the process of downloading it, but I may not install it.
The Linux I ordered is the SuSE 9.1 + Fedora 3 - DVD. I'll get them in about
3 weeks' time, when my wife returns from the States. I would very much like
to make use of the full potential of the machine I bought, and you have
given me a lot of incentive to try anything possible, Michael. Thanks. I
will be in the States in June, and hopefully a commercial version will be
available in the market by then. I may have to buy a new keyboard and mouse,
not to mention a new scanner.
J.

 

[dawg]

Still no full 3rd party 64 bit drivers support. There probably won't be
until retail release

 

[Michael Paul]

Well, I'm in the process of downloading it, but I may not install it.

The Linux I ordered is the SuSE 9.1 + Fedora 3 - DVD.

Hm, Suse 9.1 is old. The most recent version is 9.2. You can install
that directly via internet:
http://www.novell.com/de-de/products/linuxprofessional/downloads/suse_linux/index.html
(in german, but you can switch the language on that site)
Fedora also can be downloaded from the net.

I would very much like
to make use of the full potential of the machine I bought,

I understand. But the increase in performance when switching to 64bit
software will not be that big. Somebody posted that link, where XP64 is
compared to XP:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/x86-64-rc1.html

I will be in the States in June, and hopefully a commercial version
will be available in the market by then.

I personally would wait a bit longer. Even at the time, XP64 is
released to market, there won't be sufficient apps and drivers
available. That will take some time, and possibly some hardware
manufacturers will refuse to develop 64bit drivers for existing
products, so there is possibility that you will be forced to replace
some hardware due to the lack of working drivers.
And that is the reason why I will not switch to XP64. I would at least
have to replace my scanner, my ISDN modem, my TV card, my CD burning
software. And buying these things new, that's not cheap.

I may have to buy a new keyboard and mouse,

Stick with PS/2, that works always.

not to mention a new scanner.

Then never think about buying Artec, they won't even support XP SP2.
And HP's drivers are bloated. And if you also want to stick with linux,
then check www.sane-project.org in order to find a supported scanner.

greets,
Michael

 

[DougH]

Thanks. Download is on the way.

DougH
ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe/AMD 3500+
MSI NX6800GT

 

[f/fgeorge]

I personally would wait a bit longer. Even at the time, XP64 is
released to market, there won't be sufficient apps and drivers
available. That will take some time, and possibly some hardware
manufacturers will refuse to develop 64bit drivers for existing
products, so there is possibility that you will be forced to replace
some hardware due to the lack of working drivers.
And that is the reason why I will not switch to XP64. I would at least
have to replace my scanner, my ISDN modem, my TV card, my CD burning
software. And buying these things new, that's not cheap.

I may have to buy a new keyboard and mouse,

If MS continues on the path they are on, which it is assumed by most
that they will, the new XP64 will continue to downward support 32 bit
software and hardware. It will just be "optimised" for 64 bit hardware
and software.

 

[Michael Paul]

On 17 Feb 2005 00:41:23 -0800, "Michael Paul"

If MS continues on the path they are on, which it is assumed by most
that they will, the new XP64 will continue to downward support 32 bit
software

Concerning software, I will agree. Support for 32bit-apps is one of the
features.

and hardware.

No, you will not be able to install 32bit drivers on a 64bit OS without
decreasing stability. But I must admit that this is an assumption of
mine. I didn't yet find any statement that proves that 32bit drivers
can be used on 64bit Windows.
If you could provide a link, that would be fine.

greets,
Michael

 

[Dee]

No, you will not be able to install 32bit drivers on a 64bit OS without
decreasing stability. But I must admit that this is an assumption of
mine. I didn't yet find any statement that proves that 32bit drivers
can be used on 64bit Windows.
If you could provide a link, that would be fine.

greets,
Michael

Although I don't have the link readily available, there is a page on
Microsoft's web site that specifically states 32-bit drivers cannot, and
will not, work on Win x64. Their explanation is related to the
difference in addressing and pointers - basically that 32-bit drivers
are not capable of handling 64-bit pointers. If you want to use Win
x64, you will need 64-bit drivers for every piece of hardware that you
want to use with it.

Currently I am unable to find drivers for my Epson Stylus C84 color ink
jet printer and my Epson Perfection 1200S SCSI scanner, and Epson
doesn't seem to be interested in helping. All I get back from them is a
canned statement that they don't support Beta software.

 

[Michael Paul]

Although I don't have the link readily available, there is a page on
Microsoft's web site that specifically states 32-bit drivers cannot,
and will not, work on Win x64. Their explanation is related to the
difference in addressing and pointers - basically that 32-bit drivers
are not capable of handling 64-bit pointers. If you want to use Win
x64, you will need 64-bit drivers for every piece of hardware that
you want to use with it.

Thank you for confirmation.

regards,
Michael

 

[f/fgeorge]

Concerning software, I will agree. Support for 32bit-apps is one of the
features.


No, you will not be able to install 32bit drivers on a 64bit OS without
decreasing stability. But I must admit that this is an assumption of
mine. I didn't yet find any statement that proves that 32bit drivers
can be used on 64bit Windows.
If you could provide a link, that would be fine.

greets,
Michael

"Single Desktop for Technical and Business Applications
Windows XP Professional x64 Edition will provide a single desktop for
technical and business applications, eliminating the need for
technical workstation users to maintain a PC for business applications
and a separate workstation for high-end technical applications. Most
Windows-compatible 32-bit applications will run "as is" in a subsystem
of Windows XP Professional x64 Edition with comparable performance to
32-bit Windows. Workstation users can take advantage of rich
integration capabilities and productivity tools on the Windows
platform. Designers can build a model and easily share it with others
in the company, copying it in to a Word document for the finance group
or adding it to a PowerPoint slide deck for the marketing team. If you
use only 32-bit applications and work with data sets not larger than 2
GB, you will find that 32-bit, Windows XP Professional is the best
desktop system for your applications.

Windows XP Professional x64 Edition systems can be added to existing
Windows-based networks and managed alongside 32-bit systems with the
same administrative tools, making life easier for the IT department.
Overhead costs for maintaining and administering two systems are
reduced."
from
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/64bit/evaluation/overviews/overview.mspx

 

[f/fgeorge]

Concerning software, I will agree. Support for 32bit-apps is one of the
features.


No, you will not be able to install 32bit drivers on a 64bit OS without
decreasing stability. But I must admit that this is an assumption of
mine. I didn't yet find any statement that proves that 32bit drivers
can be used on 64bit Windows.
If you could provide a link, that would be fine.

greets,
Michael

here too
"Drivers
When porting drivers to 64-bit Microsoft® Windows®, consider the
following points:
If your device supports more than 4 GB, you can use the
Mm64BitPhysicalAddresses value to determine if 64-bit addressing is
needed. In addition, you can use the Dma64BitAddresses member of the
DEVICE_DESCRIPTION structure to indicate that 64-bit addressing is
supported.
The information field in the I/O status block is of type ULONG_PTR.
The parameters in the IRP stack locations are of type ULONG_PTR.
The only Halxxx functions your driver should use are the ones included
in Wdm.h. "
from
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/win64/win64/drivers.asp

 

[Dee]

"Drivers
When porting drivers to 64-bit Microsoft® Windows®, consider the
following points:
If your device supports more than 4 GB, you can use the
Mm64BitPhysicalAddresses value to determine if 64-bit addressing is
needed. In addition, you can use the Dma64BitAddresses member of the
DEVICE_DESCRIPTION structure to indicate that 64-bit addressing is
supported.
The information field in the I/O status block is of type ULONG_PTR.
The parameters in the IRP stack locations are of type ULONG_PTR.
The only Halxxx functions your driver should use are the ones included
in Wdm.h. "
from
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/win64/win64/drivers.asp

This is great information for programmers wanting to migrate 32-bit
drivers, but the end result is still that the driver must be a 64-bit
driver to work on the x64 OS.

 

[Dee]

No, you will not be able to install 32bit drivers on a 64bit OS without
decreasing stability. But I must admit that this is an assumption of
mine. I didn't yet find any statement that proves that 32bit drivers
can be used on 64bit Windows.
If you could provide a link, that would be fine.

greets,
Michael

Also for f/fgeorge who seems to want to claim 32-bit drivers will work
on x64, see info at following link:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/d..._394c38ae-a3e6-45fb-87f2-c3e227cb6b7c.xml.asp


Porting Your Driver to 64-Bit Windows

The 64-bit version of Microsoft Windows is designed to make it possible
for developers to use a single source-code base for their Win32- and
Win64-based applications. To a large extent, this is also true for
32-bit and 64-bit Windows drivers.

For user-mode applications, 64-bit Windows includes a Windows on Windows
(WOW64) thunking layer that enables Win32 applications to execute (with
some performance degradation) on Win64 systems. It does this by
intercepting Win32 function calls and converting pointer-precision
parameter types to fixed-precision types as appropriate before making
the transition to the 64-bit kernel. This conversion process is called
thunking.

Note This thunking is only done for 32-bit applications; 32-bit drivers
are not supported on 64-bit Windows.

*** Note last phrase:
"32-bit drivers are not supported on 64-bit Windows."

 

[Michael Paul]

f/fgeorge wrote: [...]

If MS continues on the path they are on, which it is assumed by
most that they will, the new XP64 will continue to downward
support 32 bit software

Concerning software, I will agree. Support for 32bit-apps is one of
the features.

and hardware.

No, you will not be able to install 32bit drivers on a 64bit OS
without decreasing stability. But I must admit that this is an
assumption of mine. I didn't yet find any statement that proves
that 32bit drivers can be used on 64bit Windows. <snipped>

"Single Desktop for Technical and Business Applications
Windows XP Professional x64 Edition will provide a single desktop for
technical and business applications, [...]
from

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/64bit/evaluation/overviews/overview.mspx

Yes, I have read that. This only proves that Win32 apps will run on
Win64. Nothing else.

Michael

 

[Michael Paul]

On 17 Feb 2005 04:51:41 -0800, "Michael Paul"

<snip>

No, you will not be able to install 32bit drivers on a 64bit OS [...]
But I must admit that this is an assumption of mine.
I didn't yet find any statement that proves that 32bit drivers
can be used on 64bit Windows.

here too
"Drivers
When porting drivers to 64-bit Microsoft® Windows®, consider the
following points:

That refers to porting existing drivers to Win64. In other words: These
are instructions for drivers developpers who want or must make new
Win64 compatible drivers. Also, this article implies, that Win32
drivers cannot be used on Win64 "as is". If this were different, then
there wouldn't be any need for porting instructions.

[...]

from

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/win64/win64/drivers.asp

Greets,
Michael

 

[Ed Light]

Currently I am unable to find drivers for my Epson Stylus C84 color ink
jet printer and my Epson Perfection 1200S SCSI scanner, and Epson doesn't
seem to be interested in helping.

It seems from this page that drivers for all Stylus series are included in
the os:

http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/DevelopWithAMD/0,,30_2252_869_875^10454,00.html?redir=IEGFC07


--
Ed Light

Smiley :-/
MS Smiley :-\

Send spam to the FTC at
(e-mail address removed)
Thanks, robots.

 

[Dee]

It seems from this page that drivers for all Stylus series are included in
the os:

http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/DevelopWithAMD/0,,30_2252_869_875^10454,00.html?redir=IEGFC07

Don't believe everything you read. The C84 driver(s) are not in the OS
package, as well as several other newer models. I have been playing
with Win x64 for almost a year now and have been to all the appropriate
sites many, many times.

If you go to the MS group for x64, you will find several posts, with at
least one confirmation from a Microsoft Rep, that the C84 is not
currently in the OS.