WinXP x64

Loaded it on two “desktop” systems for a customer evaluation. Well these are desktops in name only. Smaller than the other ferocious beasts we finished building last week, but still …

The small ones are a dual dual-core Opteron 2220 system with 8 GB ram, and 1 TB of fast disk, and a dual quad core Clovertown 5310 unit with 8 GB ram, and 1 TB of fast disk. Only differences were processor, motherboard, and RAM type, the rest of the specs were the same. The big ones … heh. A pair of dual dual-core Opteron 2220 units with 32 GB ram, and 2 TB of very fast disk, a PNY nVidia Quadro FX/3500 card, a Samsung 244T. Needless to say I haven’t had lots of time to write, been working on some of the more … exciting … issues around these units. I didn’t have time to snap their pictures, a shame, as they are quite nice to look at. Linux on the big units, with windows running in a VMWare window. Works great. Windows XP x64 running on the small units, going to a different customer. I liked the Win XP x64. Well apart from the Intel AHCI driver issue on the clovertown, there were not many problems. Windows XP x64 took right to the Opteron unit without any problems or driver disks. Performed well, almost snappy. The Intel unit took more work. Had to load the drivers, took a while to find the right ones from Intel (hint to Intel, navigating your site to find drivers is a pain). I thought the blue screen of death after rebooting was kind of a sad thing. I don’t remember how I eventually got that to go away, it appeared to be a transient phenomenon (e.g. not fixed, will come back). Had a few lockups and disk drive drop-outs. Not good. Not sure who to blame for that one. All in all though, the Windows XP x64 looks like a decent version of windows. I have been unimpressed with Vista when I played with it. Hopefully future versions can be simply bugfixed/respun XP x64. With working drivers. Linux ran fine on the machines, windows should be able to as well.