New Rig - Vista 64?

monkeyboy_garth

Hey fellas

I'm building a new rig for 3d max, zbrush, concept painting etc:

Gigabyte X38-DS4
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400
8gig DDR2 1066RAM
500GB Seagate HDD
512MB ASUS 8800GT
Pioneer DVDRW
Antec Earth Watts 650W
Antec P182 Case

Now here's the thing - with 8 gig of ram, I'll need to be running Vista 64bit.

Does anyone have any experience with Vista 64? What problems/challenges have you had?

kary

I had to get a new computer last month, so I went with 8gb of RAM and Vista64. So far it has been okay.

Some things are in different places, the UAC is annoying at first, and it does use a lot of RAM (thats fairly painless at 8gb though). The noteworthy problems: My tablet acts oddly in max. When I hold down alt to tumble the viewport interrupts itself after a few seconds and a tooltip pops up saying 'Alt'. I imagine it's related to the TabletPC software that installs by default, but I haven't found how to turn off that part yet. It's not major for me as I tend to the mouse in max and the tablet to sculpt etc. The other thing is setting the max process to low priority when rendering doesn't bring about the same interactivity crispness in other programs that it did in XP. I haven't done a lot of long renders this month though -- there is probably an alternate I haven't found yet. Couldn't get a driver for my scanner, but something like VueScan can cover that.

You can get a full 4096mb in ZB, the full amount of available RAM in max, etc. That part works as expected.

So far it has been fairly neutral for me.

PaK

My machine has vista 64-bit. It has been a disaster.

Issues:

• Randomly shuts down without warning.
• nags me about updates.
• Complains when i turn off non-essential services.
• Poor internet connectivity.
• Much slower download speeds when compared to my old XP setup.
• Poor driver support.

I have a 64 bit athalon processor 3000+ with 2 gigs of ram. I bought 4 but windows only recognized 3 of the 4 sticks...I'm not sure why.

I'm not saying these problems are not solvable, but I have put in a decent amount of effort and been smart with updates ect ect . . .

-R

[MILES]

I'm running an imac at work with Vista64 using VMWare Fusion. It works great for me.

notman

Kary, you can turn off UAC in the user settings if you want.

Monkeyboy: Check the parts you're buying for Vista64 driver support. If they aren't offering good driver support, either don't install Vista64 or get different hardware (if you still can).

Illusions

Vista Home Premium 64 bit, and no issues so far. Some of the things they won't let you do for security reasons gets annoying though, these are relatively minor though, as there are easy work arounds (like drag and drop instead of copy and paste), and its usually only dealing with stuff you don't have to deal with on a regular basis (like the System32 folder).

ImSlightlyBored

Yeah Im using vista 64
its good when you are used to it but to start with its a bit annoying having come from XP.

Aero theme causes problems in some programs - Photoshop CS3 stutters WITHOUT it turned on, Max hates it being turned on. Annoying. So if your going to be using PS (I think it was the CS editions) then turn it on (cheers to this forum for helping me with that as well.)

Apart from UAC, which I've since turned off, not much has annoyed me about it. Some of the general layout and format of the OS can seem a bit backwards at times (the control panel for one. And even though it lets you choose classic view... it never feels like it used to.)

Oh but the final, last, irksome thing - the shut down icon on the start menu. It doesnt shut down, it sets to hibernate or sleep. You have to call up an additional drop down menu to shut down. Nothing major, no, but its caused me and people I know some wasted time when getting used to it (and as I use wireless keyboard and mouse, it wont wake up at all. Great )

So overall its little things like that last point, that will get you, more than any major problems (at least, I've never had any problems I cant live with.) Its never interrupted any workflow. (I still thing XP64 has just a little more speed to it though)

Kary - good luck turning the default tablet settings off. I wish I could remember how to help you on that. I managed to do it - somehow - but I cant for the life of me remember where it was done. It was somewhere pretty obscure, but that little sliver of tablet input window was pissing me off so much.

kary

I'm glad you reminded me of that thing. I'd gotten rid of that annoying little sliver awhile ago and the max tumbling problem wound up being in that same area. The pen button as right click equivalent setting was it. With that on it mimics a right click if you hold down the pen for awhile, without it acts as what I'd expect. Weird feature. I didn't even realize was on until today -- holding it down for a long time in ZB and PS was fine, but in max it was interrupting itself (but not actually triggering a quad menu, which would have been a nice clue as to what was going on).

Aero does seem fixed in the max 2009.

There are new annoyafeatures to prune, but not deal breaking seems to be my verdict .

Pedro Amorim

Yep. im using Vista64 ultimate. and i love it. ah.. vista ultima 64 sp1. sp1 from scratch. it behaves very cool. you should bite the bullet and install it

monkeyboy_garth

Thanks for the feedback fellas. Yeah, I've been busy researching drivers etc and I think I'm pretty much set. I thought I wouldn't be able to find drivers for my modem, but I found them no worries. The only thing I'm not sure about is my scanner (I've heard there's no x64 support for the canon LiDE scanners but there's a workaround in a program called Vuescan).

Cheers!