Opinion: Twice the bits

It was slow. It was agonisingly slow. We downgraded it within a week to Windows XP.

Which was also slow, but not as slow as the Vista. Then WinXP upgraded itself to SP3. And the laptop took about a week to boot. OK, that’s an exaggeration.

It only took three days to boot.

When a friend visited with a Vista equipped laptop we laughed until we saw it boot. Fast. And do stuff. Fast. Much faster than our XP equipped Dell. But then, they probably had a nice new super fast monster chip laptop. Nope.

Their laptop was a basic model with a 2GHz Core 2 Duo chip and 1GB memory. Our Dell had an AMD 1.8GHs chip and 1GB memory. Performance should surely have been much closer.

The answer lies in the version of Vista that was loaded on the visiting laptop. It was 64-bit not 32-bit.

Any Core 2 chip is 64-bit. Our AMD was 64-bit – it said so on the sticker on the keyboard. How do you get those things off? Drag out the Vista CD and reload the sucker. Download Vista SP1 and hey presto!

The old basic Dell laptop now boots in a couple of minutes and the screen is responsive and stuff just works. Way better and way way faster than XP.

64-bit computing is a nice place to be and so far we haven’t found anything that won’t run.

So, get yourself a 64-bit edition of Vista (hint: it’s the same price as the 32-bit edition and it’s on the same CD) and get yourself well and truly over Windows XP. It’s time to move on.