I was looking at a gaming laptop with high  end nVidea Graphics and it has a 64 bit version of Windows Vista Premium Home Edition and 4 gigs of ram with  1.82 Core 2 Duo processor.  I know that many of you have been using a 64 bit OS for a while now.  What I want to know is how is the compatibility with 32 bit applications.  Does Poser and Photoshop run well on 64 bit?  How about Daz Studio and Carrara?  How about other types of software like Microsoft Office and Quicken?  The whole point in me getting a better laptop is so I can do more with graphics applications when I am away from home (quite frequently this summer).  Thanks for your help!

I can't speak for Vista, but all my work-type applications work flawlessly with Windows XP 64-bit.

• Poser
• Adobe CS3
• Cinema4d R10.5
• Maya (educational lic.)
• 3ds Max 9 (educational lic.)
• MS Office 2003

Vue 6 Infinite appears to be fine but I rarely use it.

I should point out the only 3D type app that has completely failed to work was Reiss Bodystudio (eventually had my bank dispute the charge).

Can't speak for Vista - I use XP x64 - All these work fine:

Poser7, V6I & V5I, Shade8, Hexagon, Silo, MS Office 2007 Suite, MS Money, Quicken, Quickbooks, Incredimail, PSP9, PS7, Modo302, Nero7, GeoCOntrol, WorldMachine, Carrara Pro 5 & 6 both work, Zbrush3, Blacksmith3d, P3dO Exlporer, Mailwasher, Xfrog, Google Earth & WorldWind, Kodak Easy Share, WinAmp, Realplayer & Uvmapper Pro(older version), Acronis 10 & Retrospect7(backups & ghosting) AVG 8, Winzip & WinRar, Wardrobe Wizard.

All my plugs worked for PSP except KPT1 which had a 16bit installer.

Edited: Bryce 6 & DS work although I have since deleted them due to non use.

Oops, yeah, I should have mentioned Zbrush 3 as well, works fine also.

Same as all of the above.
The only problem I have had is there is limited support for other proggies, like antivirus, defragging, etc.
There are proggies out there that address these issues but not a huge selection. And I have found some that even though they say x64 bit made my system bork. But all in all everything is much better...definately worth doing.

I have a choice between a fully loaded 32 bit HP with the same specs or a 64 bit Gateway gaming laptop. Blue Ray rom on the HP, but not on the Gateway. The big sticking point is that I can get 1 year with no payments on the HP, only 6 months no interest but with payments on the Gateway--it would just be a struggle to come up with the bucks in 6 months, and I don't intend to pay their horrid retro interest at Best Buy. I am very frustrated with my current 3D graphics performance on the current box and it's tiny 160 gig hard drive which they partitioned into halfs. Have to be careful about how many apps I install as I don't want to install them to the D drive. Perhaps I'll have to wait until I can get a better deal after I pay off some other bills.

I appreciate all your input and advice. Upgrading laptops would also mean that I would be able to do video editing on the laptop though, I don't think I could do much on the current system.

Vista 64 Ultimate running Poser 6 and 7, Photoshop CS3, Hexagon 2.1 and Vue6Infinite, no issues here!!

Vista 64 Ultimate running Poser 7, ZBrush, Vue6, etc.

Biggest trouble I see is with Poser 7. Everything else seems pretty okay, but Poser 7 runs very slow for me. As it speeds up somewhat when I turn off the hardware OpenGL preview, this may be my graphic card though ... gotta do more research.

I use Vista home premium  64 bits without problem with Poser 7 ,Carrara 6 pro,Photoshop CS3,Zbrush 3,1 ,Rhino 4,Silo 2,Painter X,Vue d'esprit 6 infinite,Pd project 4 ,Bryce 6,1,Truespace 7,5and others graphics applications
The only one which don't work is a discontinued one: Deep paint

All well behaving Windows application programs should work. The only exception being device drivers and all programs that access any device directly without using a device driver (this can only be programs for a specific type of hardware anyway and are thus actually device drivers). All device drivers are required to be 64 bit (even if they access 32 bit devices).
Any program that does behave properly isn't conforming to Windows specifications and is bound to fail on some computers anyway. Too many different hardware configurations exist and no program can cope with all of them (the device drivers solve these problems when the programs stick to the specs).
The biggest problem at the moment is that not all device drivers implement all the Windows specs properly. Over time that will be fixed for all current devices but likely several old devices will never get a (proper) device driver.
When switching to a 64 bit OS make sure that all devices are current and the last available device drivers are loaded also make sure that you power supply and cooling solution can handle the extra demands (even an idle 64 bit OS draws more that an active 32 bit OS). Provide plenty of RAM (minimum 4 GB, 8 GB preferred). And everything will behave just as good (and often even better). In those 32 bit program that need it you might actually get to use 4 GB.

Once the world gets used to 64 bit environments we may see all the benefits of this vast new space. Of course we will have to buy new computers (because 8 GB isn't enough anymore) but that keeps the economy going.

The biggest issue with a 64-bit OS has been drivers, but it looks like this is no longer the case for anything except the weirdest of peripherals.

Also bear in mind that XP64 is no longer being developed, so Vista64 is the way to go.

I'm running Adobe CS3 Design Premium (includes Photoshop) with no problems.

I'm currently moving over from XP Pro to Vista64 and seeing which 32-bit apps work and which don't, and I have found precious few, and nothing important, that doesn't. I should also point out that this moving over process has been ongoing for 8 months, and it's only in the last few weeks with the release of Vista SP1 and following the suggestions here: http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=2238 that I've had a workable Vista64 system.

I have no problems with Poser 7 - it runs better than on XP - but I can't vouch for earlier versions. The other 3D apps I run are Luxology Modo (no issues) and Vue6 Infinite 64-bit. Surprisingly, the latter isn't as stable as it could be but it's not too bad.

vista 64 is fine. the problem with it is that they are shipping it with machines that have a single gig of ram and Vista has a bunch of annoying safety features and about 30 services running by default that the average user doesnt need (FFS UPNP? Smart Cards? :rolleyes:).

drivers for mainstream hardware are no longer a problem since vista64 is officially supported by pretty much any hardware vendor whose hardware is worth buying.

DDR2 is dirt cheap right now (forget DDR3 if budget is a concern). you can build an 8 gig DDR2 quad core intel right now very cheaply, and if you spend a few hours tweaking vista to get rid of all its annoying features and services it becomes a very fast and stable OS.

pro level apps that have 64-bit support built in fly on it, and you only really see the true benefit of multitasking on something like a quad core if you have enough RAM so that its not constantly swapping things in and out of memory/pagefile.

Vista Ultimate 64 here ...

No issues with 32 bit applications apart from FaceShop.

Poser 6 &  7, D|S, Carrara, Photoshop, Corel, Bryce, MojoWorld all chug along nicely - I'd say they perform better than on my old 32 bit system.

Office and Quicken are both not an issue - in fact  I am running Quicken Cashbook 8 - so that is getting on a bit but still runs nicely.

Had a couple of problems finding a driver for my laser printer - but have noticed that later models of hardware now mostly seem to have 64 bit drivers included.

You may find you may have to run some applications as Administrator under Vista or deactivate some of the protection features - but I am sure this will improve as new releases of applications are compiled with Vista in mind.

I will echo the sentiments on ram - if possible add up to the maximum your board will take - I currently have 4 gig and have the feeling that 8 gig would be a nice figure to work with.

:)
Best Buy had a good deal on the Gateway Fx 6860 for 18 months with no interest, with a $99 upgrade to Vista Premium.  This made the computer affordable for me, so I bought it.  Thanks for all the advice.

What antivirus do you reccommend, I have a choice between North and Windows OneCare Live (have serial no. available for either or.  Both work with 64 bit OS.

I'd love to upgrade to 8 gigs of ram, especially for Vue Infinite, but the laptop only allows 4 Gigs (which came preinstalled).  I can run Vista on my XP desktop with 3 gigs of ram, but it gags on large scenes.  i'm hoping the laptop will give me more umph for that application.  I expect that renders will take longer though, the desktop has a 2.4 gig quad core, but I'm hoping I can do bigger scenes and use the reposing and Poser shader tree options better.

*What antivirus do you reccommend,

*AVG professional, no question!
Whatever you do get don't get Nortons, that gave me no end of problems on another pc I had!!

Never Norton! It's worse than a virus infection. Gobbles up resources, slows down your system by 20-30% (if you're lucky) and is almost impossible to uninstall cleanly.
AVG Free is already pretty good, but doesn't come with a firewall. Works on XP64 and Vista64.

What kind of internet connection do you use? If you're using a cable modem or DSL, those modems contain hardware firewalls, In that case, you don't really need a full fledged software firewall on your machine, the builtin Windows firewall will do.
On the other hand, if you're on dialup, you need a good firewall. AVG Pro comes with one.
Some people swear by ZoneAlarm, but my experiences with ZoneAlarm are quite negative. Hard to configure and unpredictable behavior.

avast antivirus is, IMO, the best. theres even a free home version you can use that is enough for most home users - although the professional is not that expensive.

i use the home version all the time for installing on friends and relatives machines, you just have to request a free activation key from them, takes 1 minute.

I used to swear by McAfee, then started having lots of trouble, switched to Norton and haven't had any trouble since.

I guess it all depends.

I used to swear AT McAfee.
It's what the computers at work have. Gobbles up about 30% of the computing power.
And McAfee may be even worse than Norton when it comes to uninstalling. It leaves traces everywhere that interfere with just about anything you want to do. A full OS reinstall is usually faster than wiping out those traces by hand.

svdl, my biggest gripe about McAfee: though I contacted their tech support many times with questions and problems over the course of a couple of years, I never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever received even a single reply (or solution).

I never even got a reply on their forums, and from what I could see, neither did anyone else. Don't know what it's like over there now, but a couple of years ago, the users' frustration level was intense.

When unistalling Norton I always go to their website and download their Unistall utility.  It erradicates 100% of all the Norton gunk and prevents conflicts.

You guys were right about 64 Bit OS being faster.  I've never seen Vista go so fast.  The porcessor speed is the same as my last laptop, but Vista cruises on it.  I've never seen a 32 bit Vista system respond so quickly.   I can't wait to install my 3D applications, I bet they will really rock too.

My laptop came with Internet Explorer and a Internet Explorer 64 bit version.  Is there any real difference between the 2?  I'd have perfered just one internet explorer on my computer.  I don't suppose it's possible to uninstall one version of it.

Be warned, 64-bit is not about speed - it's about memory management.  Although if you bought a large amount of RAM you'll certainly see a lot of speed improvement in many operations, be prepared to not see a huge change in render times, with the same versions of software (might even be a little bit slower). 

While I use the 64-bit browser pretty much all the time, I believe the 32-bit version is left installed in case you have some browser plugin that won't work in 64-bit (quicktime player springs to mind, shame on Apple)

The funny thing is that Windows Update doesn't work in the 64 bit version of IE. That is the reason the 32 bit version is still there.
Shame on MS - they could have fixed that by now.

Oh, I really didn't expect to have faster render times with this, that's more related to the processor I think than the OS or ram memory.    The processor is similar in speed to the one on my last laptop--it rendered in a resonable amont of time--but definitely not as fast as my desktop's Quad Care processor.  This Core 2 Duo may have a biggest chache than the last one.

Where I see a difference is in performance, windows spring open and closed in the blink of an eye.  Since I've not really done much in an application yet, it's hard to know how it will perform.

Quote - Quad Care

I hear that is 4 times better than Microsoft OneCare!

I meant Quad Core Processor.

Quad core CPU and 3 GB of RAM: that's like a Porsche engine in a Fiat.
Upgrade your RAM. DDR2-800 modules are dirt cheap at the moment, you can bring your system to 8 GB for about $200.

That 3 GB sounds to me like your system has 2x1 GB RAM modules plus 1 GB Flash (for Vista ReadyBoost/ReadyDrive). Or maybe the manufacturer plunked in 2x512MB + 2x1GB. Anyway, if your desktop has a decent mainboard it can hold 4 modules.

svdl:  Thanks for the advice, but I was referring to my desktop computer in this case.  It is a 32 bit OS--Windows XP Home Edition--I don't want to Vista my desktop and I know already that some of my hardware drivers (for peripherals, scanner, etc.) don't have 64 bit support.   XP 32 bit can only address 2 gigs of ram per application--that's why putting more in would be a waste of $. 

Although Vistaing my desktop wouldn't be as bad now as it was when I made the attempt early last year (video cards weren't properly supporting Open GL at that time);  I just went through an OS reinstall and don't want to have to deal with that again for a long time.  Regular Vista 32 bit can take up to 4 gigs of memory, but since the OS uses 1 gig in and of itself that would kind of be defeating the purpose.  Vue would definitely benefit from more RAM, and if it runs better on my laptop than Desktop computer I, I will probably do my Vue work on the laptop (provided I can make bigger scenes with more Poser figures) and use Eco Painting and other features that I've not been able to use well up to now.  Unfortunately the laptop's max ram is 4 Gigs, if it would take 8 I'd definitely upgrade my memory on that.  Vue is my only problem application on the desktop, the other apps run like silk and can render very large images in relatively short periods of time.  The Quad definitely helps with things like that, for these multi-thread applications.

I'd consider 64 bit OS for my next desktop, although it may mean buying some new periferals.  Right now I think I have the best of both world, XP for those stubborn applications that don't like Vista and the laptop for those applications that can benefit from 64 bit and more ram being available.

Oh BTW, I can add the Sims 2 as an application that runs well on Vista 64. :0)