I recently upgraded my 5 year old P4 3GHz HT, 2 Gig, 320Gig Raid 1, FX5200 128meg PC (ya so old) to the following:
Core 2 Duo 3GHz (overclocked to 3.6)
4 GIG DDR2 (will probably bump to 8 since DDR2 is so cheap)
2 1 Terabyte WD Black (5 year warranty, fast) HD (RAID 1, HD’s DIE, I only RAID, I have been in this business too long to know this!!!)
ASUS P5Q MB (8 SATA 3G controller with RAID 0,1,5,10, max 16 GIG RAM, 8 way sound, and all the bells and whistles with the great ASUS boards) (I only deal with ASUS in the motherboards. They are the BEST in my opinion!)
ASUS 9600GT 512 Meg video card.
OK its not the top of the model but I get 5.9 out of 6 rating in Vista except for the 5.8 for the CPU. I never spend (well the company pays for it but being part owner I don’t want to spend too much) for the top Intel I7 with DDR3 mem, etc. But this is still one pretty fast PC.
So I decided I wanted a 64-bit OS. I decided Vista 64-bit. I have been raging on about Vista before (negative) . I tried it before SP1 and found it OK but not as fast as XP and with the hardware I had it really was not a great feeling. Since I stepped up the hardware I decided to give it a try. I was very impressed on the speed (Windows 7 should be even better when out full). Also the drivers were pretty good also. I had to change my HP Deskjet 6122 driver to a 990C (why HP does not provide it native is crazy). My other printers I downloaded fine. Scanner was an update driver. Even the ASUS RAID SATA driver was native to the 64-bit Vista so no verified driver issue. The PC is really fast!!!. I know the 64-bit OS increases the memory requirements but on the whole it boots faster than other 32-bit Vistas I deal with. Also the sleep mode actually works. On my older board only XP would sleep properly. I tried playing with Vista before and it never worked. I tried Ubuntu and still no go. Vista works. Only had one lockup so far. It was early in one program but it has not happen after this. So far I am impressed. The only issue I had so far is trying Frostwire. I believe its a java/64-bit issue but thats fine. I wanted to run this in a virtual machine in VMware any how ( to reduce the virus/spyware, etc).
I loaded it up with my usual applications (VMware 6.X, Office 2007, MS Sync, Logmein, Idrive, AnyDVD,AVG free,Picasa3, Firefox 3.X,Core FTP, GOM player,CS3MediaMonkey, etc,) and they all worked without a hitch. Will let you know later how things go but so far I am impressed.
I thought of going Ubuntu 64-bit but there are too many Windows apps I depend on to go through the hassel. I still run it through VMware (did I mention how I love this program) for the security etc.
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