[{DvT}JonahHex]

I have had my system set up to dual boot w/ WinXP Home 32bit and Vista Home Premium 64bit for about the last 6-8 weeks or so. I can't say that I've had any great issues that I can attribute to the 64bit aspect ... save two:

1. When I have SLI mode enabled for my 8800GTX cards in Vista64, Riva Tuner only recognizes the presence of a single GPU, which allows me to only set the fan speed (to 100%) on one of the cards. Thus, if I don't use the nVidia Control Panel, w/ NTune installed, to kick up the fan speed on the other card right after booting into Vista, one GPU idles at about 63C and the other at about 70-72C. While doing this is not great task, I find having to do it to be sufficiently annoying that I have WinXP set as my default O/S and I boot into WinXP about 10 to 1 over booting into Vista.

2. When I incrementally O/C my system and start getting to the upper edge, it seems that Vista64 goes flaky on me before WinXP does. I don't know if this is due to 64bit or just Vista, since I have never dual booted Vista32 and Vista64...or triple booted all three O/Ss.

Since my system is as new as it is, I don't have the problem of trying to find 64bit drivers for 'legacy' hardware. I have found that various 64bit drivers have been updated several times already and their stability has improved from when I 1st installed Vista64...or maybe I've just gotten better at configuring my system.

I also have to say that I haven't installed all of my apps into Vista64...too much 'trouble' (in the sense of installation and configuration time, rather than problems in doing so). The apps that I have installed seem to be ok. I can't think of anything that has refused to run. Oh, the nVidia Monitor (part of nTune) doesn't like Vista64 - there's about a 4:1 chance that any time I try to run it, it will start up and but quit w/ an error before becoming functional. The users in the nVidia forums generally advise avoiding nTune altogether regardless of the O/S, but if I want to keep my GPUs cool, I have to - but I don't have to use the Monitor to do this.

Thus far, I have not found any compelling reason to use Vista (32 or 64) unless I want to use a DirectX 10 app or if I want to see the system report the 4GB of RAM that I have installed.