I already discussed the Vista x64 vs. Vista x86 question a year ago. Vista was just released and for the early adopters, the first decision to be made was which edition, i.e. 32-bit or 64-bit, would be the better choice. At this time, I was skeptical regarding Vista x64, mostly because the advantages didn’t outweigh the downsides. It is time now to reconsider this question since the main disadvantages of the 64-bit version (hardware and software compatibility) might not be such an issue anymore.

I was planning to do some research already for some time, but fortunately the German print magazine C’t (8/2008) just published a couple of comprehensive reports about this topic. So I will summarize some of their findings garnished with my own views. Today, I will focus on performance and in my next posts in this series, I will discuss software compatibility and hardware compatibility.

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Memory is getting cheaper every day. This is one reason why more and more people are equipping their PCs with 4GB RAM or more. Modern desktops often support up to 8GB. So it happens quite often these days that a proud owner of a new a PC wonders why Vista only reports about 3GB RAM even though he bought 4GB. I have been asked this question by several people within the last weeks. Some of them were IT pros, so I thought I should post something about it here. The things I say in this post mostly apply to Windows XP as well.

In theory, a 32-bit operating system should be able to support 2³² bytes = 4GB memory. Thus the first reaction usually is that the memory chips or with the mainboard has a hardware defect. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Vista can indeed address 4GB of memory. However, the maximum amount of RAM that can be used by the system and applications is 3.12 GB.

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The articles I wrote here on 4sysops about the Adminpak-Vista issue were accessed about 150,000 times. Obviously, Microsoft has managed to frustrate quite a few admins this way. It took them more than a year to finally solve this problem. And the solution is the Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT).

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Update: I posted a small guide of how to solve problems with Service Sack 1 for Windows Vista

Vista SP1 is officially only available for enterprise customers, but the reports about problems caused by this service pack are piling up. This post contains a list of all SP1 issues I am aware of.

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Windows Server 2008 RTM has been out out for some days now. I suppose only the adventurous are running it already in a productive environment. Even if you’re not planning to deploy Windows Server 2008 in the near future, I recommend having a look at its new features now. Who knows, maybe there are one or two features that might convince you to install Microsoft’s latest server OS earlier than planned.

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Of course, you can always reset a password if you have another admin account for this machine. However, if this isn’t the case, things can get a bit tricky. As a sys admin you are usually confronted with this problem if users have laptops where you don’t have an admin account. Even if you don’t have to reset a password now, you should get acquainted with this issue. Rest assured that sooner or later a user will bug you with this problem. I must admit that I managed to forget my own password more than once.

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Update: I am working on a new series about the Vista x86 vs. Vista x64 issue. The first one covers the speed issue. The other article in this series will follow soon. You might also be interested in my post about the 3GB barrier. The discussion there is interesting. But now go ahead and read this one first.

Sometime ago, I published an article about a performance comparison between 64-bit and 32-bit editions of Windows. This post got quite a few hits, recently. Meanwhile, it has rank 8 of all posts here on 4sysops (see right sidebar). Obviously, many seem to be undecided which Vista edition they would like to use. In this post, I summarized the pros and cons of Vista x64 and Vista x86.

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Vista comes with a new indexing service which improves desktop search. It not only makes search faster, but also adds some nice features. The one I like most is that it allows you to search very fast for mails in Outlook. There are, however, cases where you might want to disable Vista’s search indexing.

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Update: The Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT) for Vista SP1 replace the Adminpak.

A while ago, I liked to an article that explains how to install the Adminpak on Windows Vista. Meanwhile I found out that there is a much easier way.

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Update: Please read this review about VMware’s free P2V solution, VMware Converter 3.0 and check out my first impressions about VMware Converter 3.0 final.
We are currently setting up a new VMware server and want to migrate several physical Windows servers to virtual machines. So far, I know six different ways doing this.

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