A small part in my decision to make the leap to Vista 64 was Scott Hanselman's findings upon building his home office and a new workstation therein: moving to 64bit was a non issue. I wish I could report the same.
My first issue was with installation. With certain hardware configurations Vista x64 will crash with 4gb of RAM installed until a hotfix is applied. My understanding of the state of the 64bit world is this: the current 64bit processors are not entirely 64bit. They have 64 bit registers and some 64 bit instructions. To the average PC hotrodder or developer the preceived benefit is the ability to use 4gb of RAM instead of 2gb. I installed the hotfix, got my 4gb of RAM working, and set about playing the Sweeny Todd soundtrack whilst I decided what order to install things in...
The drivers for my X-Fi sound card installed, I started Windows Media Player. Windows Media Player crashes the first time I start it 100% of the time. Vista Sp1 and a horde of updates has not fixed this. Since the X-Fi is probably the most popular aftermarket sound card in the known universe at this time this ought to to work. It may have nothing to do with sound drivers at all. The 2nd or 3rd time I launch WMP it will work happily forever.
My graphics card is a PNY GeForce 8800GT series. It clearly lables itself as having both 32 and 64 bit drivers on the driver disc. I experienced an new Vista phenomenon with this product: installing the drivers using the OEM program declared that no changes were made to the system. I pointed Vista at the .inf file on the disc for x64 and Vista basically said its own driver ("Standard VGA Port", yeah right) was better and refused to take the OEM drivers. Only the Nvidia unified driver install would work. Odd...
My next stage is to get my various messenger programs up and running so I can chat whilst I wait on things to intall. MSN messenger is objectively the best messenging experience by far so that went worst, no issues there. I have used Pidigin for AIM (most CarSpot folks and some friends are on AIM) since having crashtastic experiences with Trillian and an absolutely astounding clusterfuck with the actual AIM product ruining a Vista install; it would seem AOL is the reigning champ for the national heavyweight Invasive Install Championships. Pidgin has similar behavior as WMP, it will crash and then run perfectly for as long as the machine is up.
My Blu-Ray drive was working fine as a Serial ATA DVD drive. Folks, installations of things like Office 2007 are actually quite painless with something better than an IDE CD drive. This alone is worth the extra expense. Still, it came with software that can play Blu-Ray and there are nights (like tonight) where I'd like to watch a movie on my 1080p monitor while some long-running tasks scroll by on my ancient 19" CRT. My first attempts at getting Blu-Ray playback working met with failure. The install process (damn you Pioneer) demanded ridiculously old and specific versions of DirectX that were clearly not going to happen on Vista 64. Some combination of Windows Update and SP1 magically fixed this, so I watched Blood Diamond on Blu-Ray while logs scrolled by tonight.
My last two 64bit issues dealt with actual software development. Visual Studio and the like installed and ran fine except for one issue so infuriating I have a dent in my forehead: copying an ASP.net solution from one machine to another suddenly started claiming that "{MyCustomThinger} RoleProvider has already been added", and commenting this part of Web.config out certainly allows the site to run. As expected, putting this web.config with the role provider commented out on any other machine (including my development laptop and the two servers where the site actually lies) crashes because of course the configuration is incorrect. I still can't explain this one. The next issue was the most time consuming.
MySQL comes in 32 and 64 bit flavors for Windows. I needed MySQL for one of my development efforts. MySQL x64 does not like Vista x64. In fact, the slightly out of date platform notes on their site claims Vista x64 is not supported, but there are enough success stories out there suggesting this is just a CYA that I gave it a whirl anyway. MySQL 64bit would not run, claimin a "side by side configuration" was incorrect. OK, knowing very litting about anything this sounds like some sort of thunking layer issue, so I'll try the 32bit version. Same error. What does Google say? Google says that the Application Manifest in the server configuration process is broken for 64bit windows. The MySQL forums claim that only a program called Reshack can fix this. The problem with Reshack is that it runs on 32bit platforms only. For those who don't know: the various Icons, embedded resources, and execution manifests for a Windows .exe get compiled into a special section of a windows PE and programs like Reshack can read/write this area without doing anything to the code itself. I eventually found a Delphi program posted by a company in the UK that would work for me. Having had some bad experience with libraries without a strong name that I am missing the code to recompile, I was glad MySQL doesn't attempt to use authenticode signatures with their releases. I changed the Vista application manifest XML to the appropriate "requireAdministrator" and I was finally off and running.
The last issue I experienced this weekend was with some code I "inherited". It uses Microsoft Jet ODBC to treat a file as a "data source", access the file rows using DataReader constructs, and sort the contents in a DataGrid. This code bombed when I ran it. Google tells me that Jet does not exist for x64. I had planned on rewriting this code anyway but wasn't up to the task tonight, so I kept looking. .NET programs are usually targetted to "any CPU" by default, but Google told me changing the target specifically to x86 would allow some extra Thunking Magic to happen, and as soon as I did this I was back on my way with Jet magically found now.
After these experiments, I'm definately going to test all of my production code to make sure I haven't done anything that won't work with 64bit editions of Windows or the .NET framework. I also need to take it upon myself to do some research: what does 64bit do for me and for Joe Consumer besides 4gb of RAM on Vista?
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