64 bit Server 2008

As a colleague recently wrote in his blog 64bit Woes not Wows! I wanted to add my two cents.

I rebuilt my laptop (Dell XPS M1710, with 4 gigs of RAM) to run Server 2008 x64 sometime around mid summer. I did this for two reasons; 1. I wanted to use Hyper-V to run VMs for client demos and 2. I find it the best way to learn a new OS. Well after months of trying to make it work I finally rebuilt this last weekend back to 32bit. The lack of Driver and software support drove this decision.

The lack of driver support drove me crazy (no Bluetooth (well one that worked well), no scanner support, webcam etc). But the thing that drove me over the edge was lack of Microsoft Groove Support (among other pieces of SW I couldn't get running Live Writer, DVD playback SW etc). I understand why there's no 64bit Office applications (yet) although they run a 32bit version in a 64bit OS. Groove wouldn't install it simply threw an error saying that 64bit is not a supported OS... really? No 32bit emulation in a 64bit OS like the rest of Office?

Also I found that with all the 32bit processes running; the whole system seem to run very slow and was constantly crashing WMI. I know, there are a lot of reasons this could have been happening, but since reverting back to 32bit I haven't experienced any of these problems. I like the idea of running a 64bit OS on my laptop and perhaps one of these days the drivers and software will catch up.

Read the complete post at http://david-stclair.spaces.live.com/Blog/cns!112A71B19678F08D!300.entry