[JonusC]

@harik wrote:

Well, a few corrections. Vista 32 does use PAE – in fact, it’s a hardware requirement to use Data Execution Prevention – you need the 64bit TLB registers. So you’re translating all 32bit addresses to 64bit registers in the TLB anyway (unless you specifically boot a no DXP 32bit kernel). Secondly, vista32, while having PAE enabled for 99% of users, does happily ignore any reported RAM above the 4gb mark. This means if your BIOS remaps 1gb of RAM to 5gb to make room for the videocard, you’re capped at 3gb. It’s actually an identical kernel to server 2008, there’s a single license key that unlocks >4gb on 32bit processors.

I’m not sure I understand any of that. PAE and DEP are two completely different things for a start, you don’t need PAE for Software DEP. For Hardware DEP on a 32-bit machine, I was never sure it was possible – but maybe that’s what you mean. To get hardware DEP instead of software/emulated DEP, you need 64-bit or PAE?

4GB of RAM is the hard limit for 32-bit systems, it’s impossible to have more than 4GB on 32-bit OS. With PAE, the limit is slighlty increased. But you need to remember that all preipherals, every PCI device, requires it’s own chunk in the memory pool for Device Drivers to properly address it once the CPU enters Protected Mode because it’s then impossible for the OS to probe the BIOS. If I ever see a 32-bit machine with 4GB of RAM available, I will eat my hat. And if I ever see a 32+4=36-bit (PAE enabled) machine with more than 4GB of available RAM for Windows memory pooling, I will eat my entire wardrobe of hats and shirts and etcetera.

Unless there’s some freaky new tech I don’t know about.

You’re partially correct about virtualization as well – there are hardware VT extensions in 32bit processors (or 64bit in 32bit host mode), but they’re not as complete as the 64bit AMD set (Intel is (was?) missing some of the IO virtualization, moving more of the work into the hypervisor. VMware refuses to use the 32bit extensions, but Virtualbox does (apparently, I haven’t tested).

Yeah, that’s what I pretty much ment. You can get some hardware virtualization in a 32-bit host, but true hardware virt. comes with a 64-bit OS; i.e., all the fancy extension sets become available when the CPU is in x86-64 mode.

I’d imagine that running a modern dualcore CPU with a decent videocard could play a bluray (GPU decoding offload) on one monitor while running CS3/CS4 on the other – in either 32 or 64bit mode.

Except I work with 100megapixel+ images half the time, and CS4’s private working set ranges between 3GB-4GB of RAM usage as I apply filters. But otherwise, yeah maybe so.

@RemixedCat wrote:

I remember the humoungous hell that was ME it came with my parent’s dell. It cause many a fight, and it was a blight, shocked the world of computing and thier sales were muting, it was loads of stress, just like PMS.

Me went down in history as the king of the BSOD. I remember with my 3DFX card, it would just blue screen before even logging in. Every time 😆 one of the millions of hotfixes for Me eventually fixed it though.

[JonusC]

Yeah, I agree with JingoFresh to be quite honest. Plus, I ironically have hosted a UT3 server on my UAC enabled account, it installed and worked as expected. I’m only guessing that you come from a Linux background with questions like this, so i’ll repeat – Windows does things differently and there’s no such this as an interactive “SYSTEM” or “TrustedInstaller” account you can use.

Just disable UAC and take full control of your entire harddisk via the TAKEOWN and ICACLS commands (the WinNT6.1 equivalent of CHMOD) if you really want to do it, but don’t be surprised if you get Reverse ARP poisoned or Hijacked/Clickjacked or (trails off)…

😀

[JonusC]

@DMikeM wrote:

I have had to do that with a few folders. One was just so I could install a UT3 Server and be able to manage it correctly.
You cannot install such things in the default Program files or program files (x86) folders. Server, Vista and Win 7 will just not give you the correct permissions even if your account is an admin account.
There has got to be a way somewhere in the Policies or registry to give a USER, GOD access to the system.
I even added my account to act as system and that still doesn’t cover it.

Running a process as administrator via Runas in CMD, right-click context menu or, in the case of startup programs for legacy apps, use Task Scheduler to run on login as max privledges.

What you want to do is disable UAC completely and take Full Control of all folders. But if you do that, you might want to nail down your security to the max with clientside firewalls and a strong permanent AV as your system will then be vulnerable to rootkits – despite it being x64.

Unlike Linux, there is no “root user” that is interactive in Windows NT and there never was. Usermode applications never have direct kernalmode access, even when you set the “Allow user to act as part of the operating system” flag. Because then you’d be as secure as Windows 98 and malware could just run DELTREE %WINDIR% /S /Q and you’re dead =P

I’ve actually never had UAC enabled on my PC since Vista, but as of about 2 weeks ago I enabled it in Windows 7 and managed to get used to it very quickly. Since I don’t hack around with my OS everyday anymore, I like to leave it on for that extra level of protection just incase I get a hijack scenario from some new freaky virus outbreak.

[JonusC]

@RemixedCat wrote:

I think they have better luck when they release as a yearversion rather then a vanity name like Millenium Edition or Vista (marketing) did.

windows 2000 did good, 2003, and s 2008 did.

Yeah, I never replied to that one. Microsoft has a tick-tock development process, Me and Vista may have been failures but they were made by different dev teams than XP and Win7. The Me/Vista team pioneered a lot of new and even experimental/buggy features (tick phase), then XP/Win7 refined, improved and streamlined these (tock phase).

Windows Me is actually better than 98 though, when it’s all patched up it is a faster and more stable OS than 98SE. It was just a crap-pile when it first came out (like Vista was). Me was the first OS to have System Restore 😉

[JonusC]

Nono, i do agree with that part. Your completely right, as I said – most people don’t care if it’s half a second faster or whatever – just so long as it works. And 32-bit is still much more compatible thus more popular 🙂

But yeah, for those of us who depend a lot on fancy production stuff, or even who just like to be on bleeding edge, x64 has it’s obvious advantages. And that varies per person.

P.S. Thanks for the link to the new site Xxcom9a, I moved it to the top 😉
P.P.S. I’ve added a couple of new things.

[JonusC]

@Indrek wrote:

Pardon, but I don’t think I ever said x64 was useless. Quite the contrary, in fact. However, since most of the software we use is produced by businesses, usefulness is only part of the equation.

I ment no offence at all sir, i was politely trying to say that you are wrong in stating that x64 “is not worth it to most people”. The binaries are known to be faster and more secure in every way, and yes – even E-Mail, Web Browsing, Playing/Converting music in iTunes/WMP and Desktop Publishing/Typing are faster in x64 for the reasons i stated already. Namely, faster decoding and encoding of compressed data (Images and Music) and why an x64 Browser is indeed very worthwhile.

Not to mention the memory hog that is IE8 😆 Whenever I open a new tab in IE8 it takes a second to load it. The x64 version of IE8 is nearly instant. But I am still on Firefox 3.5 32-bit anyway, because Adobe STILL havn’t released an x64 runtime of Flash 10 😡

[JonusC]

@Indrek wrote:

*shrugs* 32-bit versions of IE and WMP work perfectly well for me (although my music collection is but 1/6th the size of yours). I suspect whatever problems you’re having with 32-bit IE might be caused by add-ons, rather than any inherent instability of the x86 platform, perceived or real.
And at any rate, we can keep bringing up niche scenarios like 120 GB music libraries until the cows come home, but that doesn’t change the fact that there’s currently no need for the entire home computing industry to move to 64-bit.

The AMD x86-64 architecture along with a 64-bit operating system gives full hardware DEP to boost the Driver Signing to a low-level, this has made Vista/Win7 x64 the most secure x86 OS in existence. You heard me, more secure than Linux – there’s a reason why ParadoX, Skidrow and Fairlight run Vista as their OS of choice. Anyway, all that’s an extremely important security aspect of 64-bit machines – keeping that Driver Signing enabled along with UAC, DEP and in this example i’m about to give – running a 64-bit browser – makes the system practically immune to rootkits and a variety of other memory pool overruns and thread code injections. Basically, you don’t even need to run antivirus on Windows 6 x64 if you know how to navigate the web safely. {FYI: I’m only saying that as a disclaimer, i.e. there’s no excuse for a stranger not in our current conversation to go click a commercial on a torrent site and run a file called “omg_hot_chick_wif_huge_bewbz.jpg.exe” then accuse me of being wrong}. 😀

@Indrek wrote:

@RemixedCat wrote:

32 bit does not have multicore support

Come again?

32-bit only supports dualcore CPU’s, that is – it can only simultaneously process two threads at a time. A 3-or-more core CPU I think is still detected on Vista 32-bit (not sure about XP, but XP is complete crap with thread management anyway) but the quantum scheduler can’t actually handle more than two threads simultaneously. It’s a laneway limitation with the L1 cache from memory, it needs to be in x86-64 mode (and whatever Intel’s equivalent is) to use it all properly.

Anyway, yeah – x64 is not as useless as you might have thought. It was at first, but it’s slowly taking off as developers take advantage of the additional extensions. SSE2 instructions for example, in 64-bit realmode, is at least 10% faster in every test I remember seeing (video encoding, JPEG decoding, RAR extraction/compresion, etc). Take a look at these benchmarks of Firefox 32-bit Vs Firefox x64. And that’s a 1 year old article, running an experimental/unofficial 64-bit compile of Firefox.

Times are a changin’ 😉

with a little trick you can allocate more then 3GB by PAE ( physical address extensions ) and optionally ( on my board ) there is an option for it 🙂

That won’t work for me since I have a 1GB PCI-e v2.0 graphics card. I’ll actually get ~2.8GB max with this card if I only ran 32-bit, otherwise I will have to start pulling out wireless card/firewire controller/USB hubs/mouse/etcetera 😛 And BTW, PAE slows your CPU down because it has to translate 32-bit calls to 36-bit calls with every memory request. Try it – do a CPU becnhmark in Everest with PAE on, then repeat with it switched off.

EDIT: 32-bit OS’s also can’t use Hardware Virtualization featuresets. VMWare, Virtual XP Mode in Windows 7 and the exotic nature of encoding my DVD’s to WMV for Windows Media Center with CUDA acceleration, they are all faster in 64-bit. So is DXVA playback – I couldn’t imagine playing a BluRay movie on one monitor while working in Adobe CS4 on the main one in 32-bit 😉

It’s true, the majority of grandpa’s and girlfriends will have no use for 64-bit really so you still have a good point. They won’t care that it takes 2 seconds quicker to skip through a movie, or load an 8Megapixel photo (my GF does tho she’s a hardcore photographer lol), just as long as it works. And we all know that 32-bit wins in compatibility.

[JonusC]

You’re kidding, right?

The x86-64 extension is a complete crapheap, the computer i’m using right now is still based on technology invented in 1981. So that side of it is true. But if legacy support was REMOVED, a new system was invented to replace the x86 architecture, but still capable of hardware emulation (as I mentioned previously) then… well, it’d be BRILLIANT and there are definately advantages to a true 64-bit system. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/64-bit#Pros_and_cons

Of course it won’t happen for a while, but it will one day.

If you don’t care about the technicals, basically the reason why Mac is still the dominant machine in high-end production and creative industries is because they are pure 64-bit (well not ALL, but the ones that are 64-bit are REAL 64-bit, not like IBM-based PC’s we’re using here). If you try editing a 2 hour long BluRay-definition video on any 32-bit Mac or Windows machine; you’d need a crazy RAID rack to compensate for the constant swapping. And of course the application has to be 64-bit compiled to get all that extra bandwidth to the CPU too.

[JonusC]

Yeah, I hope so too. For old schoolers like myself, they would be much better off with a fully seperate, core virtualization/emulation of traditional Win32 binaries.

Windows 8 probably won’t exist by the way, but that’s only my sort-of-expert opinion. Chances are it will be something completely new – and I REALLY hope it’s based off Microsoft Singularity rather than continually-expanded Windows NT.

[FYI: Virtualization is practically the same as emulation, however a “virtualized” guest does not emulate the CPU (sometimes other components too) since the hardware is already capable of doing it natively]

EDIT: Sorry, not Singularity. I ment Midori.

[JonusC]

@shahed26 wrote:

Although this means no x86 apps can be installed, but atleast developers will start coding native x64 softwares.

Incorrect. I install many programs, both 64-bit and 32-bit, to E:Program Files, it makes no difference where they are installed. The reason why ProgFilesx86 exists is because of WoW64 (Windows on Windows 64) internal duplicates – for example there is both a 64-bit and 32-bit version of the Sidebar.

To get rid of it would be the same thing as getting rid of System32 😯 It’s for backwards compatibility with legacy programs (in this case, it’d be some sort of Vista gadget I think – it installs to the ProgFilesx86 folder but the 64-bit version still sees the installed gadgets from the 32-bit version).

[JonusC]

W00000t 😆

MinWidth doesn’t work on Windows 7 RTM (it doesnt exist, I killed explorer and created the key, restarted explorer, no effect). Bugger. Just like IconSize doesnt work for Details view anymore in x64 Explorer 🙁 I miss my 24×24 icons in Details!

Yeah, for those who remember me I havn’t been active as i’ve been working and moved over to Windows 7 RTM/Gold since becomming a member of MSDN. Busy busy busy, dreaming about AJAX and PHP every damn night 🙄

Bye bye until I post another random message in (probably) another few months… 🙁

[JonusC]

Make Creator Owner have the Full Control + Special aswell since the Creator Owner is usually SYSTEM and the restrictive-inheritence of “none” would override the FULL CONTROL of SYSTEM before it 🙂

It might no matter, but better safe than sorry. Apart from that – perfect.

[JonusC]

@Marksman wrote:

Hi!

I did the same stupid thing as seancho and denied the access to all users.

After that I managed to install Avira Free without problems.

But when I tried to change back the registry changes I received a warning: Error Opening Key. ProductOptions cannot be opened. An error is preventing this key from being opened. Details: Access is denied.

Then I made another stupid thing, I restarted the comp, erasing the “last known good configuration”, because it loaded win 2008 just fine.

So, now I have a “normal” running system, but I cannot change the registry tweak back to the original state.

Should I be worried? Is there any way to recover the registry now?

EDIT: I made all the registry modifications as Admin.

Administrator is always able to take ownership or change permissions of any file/folder. You’re probably experiencing inherited permissions, change the folder owner (key owner) first and try again

[JonusC]

@hoak wrote:

Thanks, I still wonder if DX9 and 10 games will perform better on the Sever OS’s then they do on the Client as was the case with 2003 vs XP…

I used RC1 of Windows 7 [build 7100] and found that many games on my Athlon X2 5000+ with 9600GT would crash and glitch up, no matter what nVidia drivers I used and even on a fresh Win7 install. However switiching to Server 2008 R2 Build 7100 when that came out, and using the exact same nVidia drivers, it no longer crashed or glitched or had any “hitches”.

I think the main reason why Server is sometimes faster than Workstation [not for everyone] is that it doesnt have all the bulk behind it and extra services. Windows Search, Media Center extenders, all that stuff. But some people dont have much of a speed improvement, I imagine that a current-gen computer – such as an Intel i7 with 8GB of RAM and a 10,000RPM SATA-II harddisk – would probably make no difference.

@hoak wrote:

“rundll32.exe powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState Hibernate“

Yup, I have that command bound to WINKEY+F12 😉

[JonusC]

@hoak wrote:

Appreciate the update! Does this build of R2 still have the Vista UI or does it feature the new Windows 7 UI enhancements? Also, have you tried running any 3d applications or games to see how they perform?

The fact that Server 2003 Web edition not only consistently out performs XP running DirectX 9 applications (and games for those interested), but is so much better behaved — has made it a superb production platform for Game Development…

I’m hoping there will be a Web edition of R2, and that it will offer similar capability of installing a very clean build environment that offers similar performance and relieability advantages with DirectX 10-11 — Server 2008 SP2 isn’t quite there, and Windows 7 still looks and performs like a bloated Consumer/Idiot OS…

😕

Server 2008 R2 has the Windows 7 UI in full, the Superbar is all there and thanks to AsciiWolf we also have the Desktop Gadgets too (not sure if he made it or just found it though) anyway here’s the things:

Server 2008 R2 Desktop Gadgets: viewtopic.php?f=17&t=739&p=4327&hilit=sidebar#p4327
Server 2008 R2 GameUX Patch: viewtopic.php?f=17&t=861#p4134
[Above does not give Game Explorer however, just fixes some Vista-Only game detection]
Server 2008 R2 Gamepads Control Panel Applet: viewtopic.php?f=17&t=861#p4136
[With the above installed you need to do Start > Run > joy.cpl because it doesnt appear in control panel, however my PS3 SIXAXIS Controller is working GREAT in Server 2008 R2 😉 ]

I’ve been running Server 2008 R2 Release Canidiate for a month or two now, and games run very well. Command and Conquer 3 (and Red Alert 3), The Sims 3, Fallout 3, BioShock, Doomsday Engine [Doom sourceport using OpenGL], DOSBox, WinUAE [Amiga Emulator], gaming works great hoak!

The only two quarrels I have is that Superfetch is not present at all in Server 2008 R2 – but it still is fast, it just doesnt reboot super fast like Windows 7 does. However I never turn my computer off anyway, I always put it to Sleep – which brings me to the second quarrel; sleep is not in the start menu. You have to go to CTRL+ALT+DELETE and go to the power-button in the bottom-right and choose Sleep from there.

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