Thinkpads Forum

Maybe this has been answered before, but my search didn't really net me the answers I'm looking for.

I'm contemplating upgrading my X301 to Vista 64 from Vista 32. What real advantages does upgrading provide? I realize 32 to 64 bit computing, but in real world performance and stability, as it relates to Vista, is 64 worth the price of admission? Can you still run 32 bit apps on a 64bit os? What are the caveats.

Any input, links or info is greatly appreciated.

Maybe windows 7 is a better choice?

Win 7 is most definitely a better choice, but as of now it´s in beta testing mode, so not really recommended for a main setup.
Advantages of x64:
1. More RAM addressable;
2. Raw computation performance advantages for applications with x64 native support (like 3ds Max, Maya, Autocad, Matlab incl. Simulink, Mathematica etc).
3. In theory: more stable and less vulnerable to malware
4. "Cumulative effect": it appears to behave better under heavy load.

That´s actually all about x64 advantages.


Marin

EDIT: Added 4. ...ah yes, no problem to run 32bit apps under Vista x64, but some of those may have worse performance than under x86, and just for the record, your old windows 95 16bit apps won´t run on Vista x64

If you need to 16 bit apps on Vista 64, you can probably use Virtual PC.

In my opinion, the main practical advantage of Vista 64 bit is the ability to address 4GB of Ram instead of ~3GB. The main caveat is that you still might run into some applications that don't have 64bit support e.g. I recently wanted to install DVD43 on a 64-bit vista system, and it looks like it only supports 32-bit Vista.

Personally, I'd prefer 64 bit, but not enough to spend additional money on it!

@shfawaz - check out my various posts on Vista. Aside from memory, 64-bit is faster, and in addition, will put you on the road to upgrading to 64-bit apps. In a nutshell, anything but 64-bit in 2009 and later is a waste of investment. .... JDH

@OP: just a side note... don´t underestimate the amount of RAM. 4GBs of RAM under Vista or Win 7 can be actually considered as "standard" because Vista and WIn 7 implement much different memory management than XP and can actively utilize the more available memory. Not to mention that simple file copying or burning a DVD with Nero 8 benefit from the extra available memory. Why 4 GB as "standard"? Let´s say you have some excessive amount of RAM (say 8GB) installed, then Vista/Win 7 will have enough space to cache various things (it does cache even with prefetch/superfetch turned off) and there will be enough free memory. In the XP era the users were interested in the physical memory usage (a.k.a the green bar in task manager), in Vista era we are much more interested in free memory because it means extra performance since the cache is granted.

Marin


PS: this thread would find much more responses in the Vista subforum ... and btw, if you really have excessive amount of system memory, you may want to consider RAMdisk.

As a question related to this thread, does MATLAB, say, run significantly faster under Vista x64 than Vista x32, and if so what kind of performance gain do you get?

Thecla wrote:As a question related to this thread, does MATLAB, say, run significantly faster under Vista x64 than Vista x32, and if so what kind of performance gain do you get?

It depends on what you understand under "significantly faster", but the difference can be noticeable depending on what you do and what hardware you use. Unfortunately, I can´t give you exact numbers, but I remember to have posted in this forum some benchmarks long time ago using the Matlab buil-in benchmark function. Also not far ago I was able to directly compare Matlab performance under Vista 32bit and Vista 64bit on the same machine (the ThinkPad in my signature) and I can remember that the benchmark results were noticeably better with the 64bit version (except for the graphics test, which gave worse results for Vista x64 ). Anyway, I even made some screenshots which I later lost together with lots of other pictures So, all I can tell you is just what I remember. Also, I remember running some mathematical algorithm (not on my ThinkPad) under Vista 32bit and it took about 1h and 40 min, the same algorithm took about 1h and 20-25 min under Vista x64 (same hardware). As of now I happen to run Matlab only on Linux machine, but say next week (when I´ll probably get an external HD to free up some space on the my main HD) I could try to install Matlab on my Vista x64 setup and benchmark it for you. If you happen to have similar hardware and Vista 32bit, we could compare the results. That would be definitely interesting from empirical standpoint

Cheers

Marin

Has anyone upgraded their X301 from Vista 32 to 64bit? Are there drivers available?

Greg Gebhardt wrote:Has anyone upgraded their X301 from Vista 32 to 64bit? Are there drivers available?

I don´t have a X301, but I see no problem with running Vista x64 on X301, you can find drivers in the X301 driver matrix

Marin