So, I made the 64bit plunge...

[jsbowden]

I went ahead and repartitioned, formatted, and started over. I am now primarily using Vista 64bit at home. I have a Windows XP partition for the things that will not run on Vista, and I have 50GB reserved for FreeBSD once -CURRENT gets to a point where it will boot on my machine and is stable (for now, I have my 7-STABLE partition on my laptop when I need it).

The biggest thing I noticed? Disk IO speeds. On XP and Vista 32, my SATAII drives achieve an upper bound of just over 50MB/s read and write speeds. With Vista64 I get just under 80MB/s (for testing, I copied a Solaris 10 x86 ISO from drive to drive in each (using the same starting and end point for each of course)). And of course, Vista64 actually uses all 4GB of RAM.

I wish FreeBSD didn't lock up playing in USB land booting an install disc, as I'd love to benchmark it on my machine. It handily outperforms Vista32 on the laptop, and I'm curious how it would stand against Vista64 on my desktop.

Why am I still at work? Because some idiot fucking subcontractor emailed us something they shouldn't have, and I'll be here for another couple of hours cleaning this shit up. Just how I wanted to start my weekend.

Comments

[jsbowden.livejournal.com]

Don't worry, I'm totally patched to current. The day SP1 was available I loaded it on the laptop once I isolated which driver was in the way (didn't like the sound driver, fixed that right up) because it also fixed some GPO stuff that was making life weird on the AD domain for me. The desktop at home never had any driver conflicts at all. I've never had a single stability problem with Vista. The only blue screen I've seen was due to a bad DIMM. I'm actually kind of shocked at just how stable it's been. I know there are some people who've had serious problems with it, but I haven't seen any on the Dells at work or on my custom built box here (I'm home now), but all these machines are using hardware that was released after Vista's RC and beta stages.

[dlganger.livejournal.com]

I had issues with the Atheros wireless driver on my Macbook, but SP1 pretty much fixed that. I don't live in fear of the latest Windows Update any more.