64 bit Vista - help and advice

[Beth UK]

Hello,

I thought I would turn to the trusted folk of DonationCoder to ask some advice.

I am thinking of moving to a 64 bit Vista system (custom built system) and need thoughts or advice from anyone who has experience with this.

My main aim is to maximise the amount of RAM and processing power I have for applications like Photoshop CS3 etc etc. I work with HUGE images (up to 1 gig) and my current system is starting to choke a bit. A 64 bit system allows applications to address larger amounts of RAM. Although Photoshop is a 32 bit program it will (apparently) make use of a little extra RAM under a 64 bit system. News is that the next version may have increased 64 bit support!

When I go to computer builders here in the UK I get a lot of bulls**t most of the time with some even trying to convince me I can use 8 gig of RAM on a 32 bit system.?!?

Any ideas or system configs for 64 bit system?

[Carol Haynes]

See my message here for MS 32-bit memory management.

My understanding is that 64-bit Windows doesn't suffer from these memory restrictions but there are driver and software compatibility issues. I can't find the article at the moment but I read some articles a while ago that did benchmark comparisons with Windows XP 32 and 64 bit versions and actually found the 32 bit version was faster - go figure. I would have though 4GB with 32 bit windows would be OK for your needs - perhaps check your PS preferences to ensure you allow PS to use enough physical memory. Also move your scratch files to a separate parttition on a different hard drive from the windows drive (and if you can a different drive to the windows page file).

[f0dder]

A 32-bit application still has a 32-bit address space, so it cannot make use of more memory, unless it uses the "address window extensions" API - so you need a 64bit version of photoshop to take advantage of extra memory.

For 32-bit windows, there's boot.ini switch to change the usermode:kernelmode memory address space from 2:2gig to 3:1gig - you should google the boot.ini /3G switch for the implications. Notice that windows will *still* use the default 2:2 split for applications that haven't been marked "large memory aware" though!

Also, even regular 32bit windows should be able to take advantage of >4GB memory, as long as your processor supports PAE mode (introduces with the pentium pro a zillion years ago) - it's turned on by default if you have DEP enabled. This won't let a single application use more memory, but the physical memory can be used for separate instances of your apps, system cache, etc.

[devangx5]

Hey! Thanks for all the great news and links to awesome apps/utilities. I just love DC.

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