Getting a new computer

Well, we (my family and I) are getting a new computer. Not a new PC in the sense of Dell or HP (which are now the better PC brands), but rather in the sense of a self-assembly kit.

The kit includes:

• A corporate steel ATX Mid-Tower case with 7 expansion slots and 600 watt power supply
• A powerful motherboard with:

NVIDIA nForce and NVIDIA GeForce chipset

A 1333 MHz front side bus

4 SATA ports (3.0 Gbps) and on-board RAID

Gigabit LAN interface

HDMI — great for my 24″ widescreen monitor which supports 1920×1200

8-channel high definition audio

PCIExpress

• An amazing Intel Core 2 Quad (Q6600) processor

Each core: 2.4 GHz

A 1066 MHz front side bus

An 8 MB cache

Support for EM64T (x64)

Support for Intel Virtualization (perfect for running virtual machines)

Stuff like Smart Memory Access, Advanced Smart Cache, Advanced Digital Media Boost, etc.

• 2 GB of DDR2 memory  at 667 MHz — not amazing or great, but good for our needs; besides, DDR2 is insanely cheap to add.

No monitor, hard drive, optical drive, or operating system. That’s okay, because we have all of the above. It also doesn’t come with a fan/heatsink, so we had to buy one with the kit.

This computer is going to be an excellent improvement over the current Intel Pentium D (2.66 GHz) that I use everyday. Do you know how hard it is to do all of the things I do on 512 MB of shared memory (DDR1, no less — expensive to upgrade) and bad integrated graphics that won’t let me make full use of the 1920×1200 monitor? Memory is the most crippling limitation of my current computer; I can’t multitask very well, and running Firefox and Word side-by-side is sluggish.

Yes, I know. At some point in the past, people lived on 286’s and 4 MB of RAM.

With this new machine, the video compression that I do will be blazing fast — on 4 cores. And I do believe that setting up virtual machines on the computer (perhaps a Linux server and a virtual 32-bit XP installation) will be the best way to suit all of our needs — my father’s compute-intensive scientific research, my own Web development and multimedia work, as well as for running all of the miscellaneous items that won’t run well on 64-bit Windows. (Yes, I’m going to be installing Windows XP Professional x64 Edition; I’m not quite ready for Vista yet.)

As of right now, the barebones kit isn’t yet sold out, so take a look. It’s only $299.99 after instant rebate and mail-in rebates.

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Disadvantages of Windows XP Professional x64 Edition

The title may seem a bit biased, given that I’m not going to even list the benefits of computing on a 64-bit or amd64 PC. However, I’d like to talk about how using Windows XP Professional x64 Edition sucks.

I’ve used this operating system in the past, but ultimately decided to switch over to 32-bit Windows because of numerous incompatibilities. It is the same incompatibilities which are causing me grief now, after I switched back to it following a virus infection. Though Windows XP Professional x64 Edition (I’ll just refer to it as x64 Windows from now on) comes with 32-bit editions of the same DLL’s in order to support most 32-bit programs written for “normal” Windows, many programs simply do not run on x64 Windows.

Highly complex applications like Google Earth and iTunes come with bundled DLL’s that are necessary for the application to load. These libraries can include audio codecs, compression libraries, and even DLL’s for interacting with the graphics card. Unfortunately, these are also (usually) 32-bit libraries which CANNOT be loaded by a 64-bit program.

That, of course, is an over-simplification of the various troubles, but to put it bluntly: quite a lot of good programs don’t work on x64 Windows. It’s why I can’t use Google Earth on x64 Windows, and why I can’t install iTunes on Windows XP Professional x64 Edition — though iTunes is available for x64 Vista.

A further incompatibility is Macromedia / Adobe Flash. There is no Flash ActiveX control available for the native 64-bit edition of Internet Explorer on Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. Though one can download the ActiveX control for the 32-bit edition of IE, this loses a great deal of the security offered by x64. (But I’m not going to get into that, given what I’ve said about not listing benefits.) I don’t know if Sun offers a native 64-bit edition of the Java Virtual Machine.

The same incompatibilities have slowed the adoption of 64-bit computing, and due to that unwillingness to switch to this vastly-superior structure, companies are simply NOT making drivers and programs for native 64-bit execution.

A great example of this is Microsoft’s webcams; webcams are one of the many gadgets that do not come with 64-bit drivers, but it stands out in particular: companies rarely release 64-bit drivers. Microsoft’s webcams do not come with drivers that can work on Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.

That means that I can’t use my current webcam or the software for my wireless mouse.

If you are considering using x64 Windows — for whatever reason — make sure your devices come with drivers for or support x64 Windows. Also try to ensure that the companies that produce your favourite or most valued software also make native 64-bit editions that do not need to be run in an emulated mode (known as Windows on Windows in XP Pro x64). Fortunately, Microsoft Office 2007, Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional (8.1), and major peripheral manufacturers like Epson and Brother do come with 64-bit libraries that install perfectly on x64 Windows.

In any case, you will run into a lot of incompatibilities if and when you try x64 Windows.

Update: I am back on 64-bit Windows and compatibility has improved drastically. 64-bit is becoming mainstream.

(3 votes, average: 3.67 out of 5)

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