Windows XP 64 Bit—Why I’m Not Installing it…For Now…
PC World’s website posted an article yesterday a link to a Microsoft download site where I could get a copy of Windows XP 64 bit edition, RC1 (release candidate 1). Since I’m on broadband at home, the 450MB download would be lengthy but not intolerable. While I don’t have an Athlon 64 CPU yet, I’ve been toying with the idea for quite a while now. And I’m still thinking about it. But for now, I’ve decided not to download it.
The download file has to be burned to a CD and the installation run from the CD. I really don’t have a problem with that and have considered downloading it just to have it for when I do upgrade. ATI does have a 64 bit beta driver for Radeon cards, so I would have video support. But XP 64 will not have 16 bit application support, meaning that applications built for Win95/98/3.1 will not run, as won’t any DOS applications I still own. Additionally, I could count on the OS killing all my Norton Utilities and Anti-Virus as well as Partition Magic and any other disk utility I own. I still remember how upgrading to XP on the PC side and Panther on the Mac side killed applications I really liked. I won’t upgrade to XP64 without a lot of thought.
I can’t really afford to upgrade all my applications on both my PC and my Macs. Frankly, I’m already at 64 bit computing, if in name only, on the Mac side of the house because of my G5 iMac. I’m sure I’ll move my XP machine over to a 64 bit CPU and perhaps this year, but my move to XP’s 64 bit operating system may come a lot later. I have no compelling reason to move. All my PC applications are 32 bit. I am doing some video editing on the PC this week, but it’s a minor project to output some short movies in Windows Media format (.wma, .wmv). I just don’t want all the possible hassles such an OS upgrade might entail.
The download file has to be burned to a CD and the installation run from the CD. I really don’t have a problem with that and have considered downloading it just to have it for when I do upgrade. ATI does have a 64 bit beta driver for Radeon cards, so I would have video support. But XP 64 will not have 16 bit application support, meaning that applications built for Win95/98/3.1 will not run, as won’t any DOS applications I still own. Additionally, I could count on the OS killing all my Norton Utilities and Anti-Virus as well as Partition Magic and any other disk utility I own. I still remember how upgrading to XP on the PC side and Panther on the Mac side killed applications I really liked. I won’t upgrade to XP64 without a lot of thought.
I can’t really afford to upgrade all my applications on both my PC and my Macs. Frankly, I’m already at 64 bit computing, if in name only, on the Mac side of the house because of my G5 iMac. I’m sure I’ll move my XP machine over to a 64 bit CPU and perhaps this year, but my move to XP’s 64 bit operating system may come a lot later. I have no compelling reason to move. All my PC applications are 32 bit. I am doing some video editing on the PC this week, but it’s a minor project to output some short movies in Windows Media format (.wma, .wmv). I just don’t want all the possible hassles such an OS upgrade might entail.
posted by Andy Foster at
3:08 PM
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