Whose running Live on Vista x64? And what do you think?

mbenigni · Post by **mbenigni** » Tue Aug 26, 2008 3:57 pm

Performance? Compatibility? (Excepting oundcard driver issues, of course.)

The last "official" word from Abe was on a webpage concerning version 6, so I'm wondering what to expect now. The PC's in parts and I have both 32-bit and 64-bit ready to go.

Mind, I'm a big XP proponent, but the POS motherboard I bought doesn't want to install XP, so moving on...

nebulae · Post by **nebulae** » Tue Aug 26, 2008 4:03 pm

The general consensus is that Vista works most of the time - there are a few psycho external plugs that may give you trouble.

But the biggest issue is that Vista takes about 5-10% out of Live on XP. Not sure why, but given that Live chokes around 60-70% CPU, that would be enough for me to return the mobo and get an Asus or Gigabyte which will install XP without any problems.

abort · Post by **abort** » Tue Aug 26, 2008 4:04 pm

Well I hope it works out for you. If its a new motherboard you might have better luck than me.

I tried windows vista but it didn't work right on this older computer.

get a good graphics card and as much memory as you can. 64bit has memory options than 32bit I think.

Good luck!!!

jonnytekno · Post by **jonnytekno** » Tue Aug 26, 2008 4:58 pm

I have a 64bit PC with Vista, but I don't think it's Vista 64. Anyway, it works like a dream as far as I can tell (not having used it on any other set up). It does take quite a while to load sets up sometimes and to actually boot the programme up in the first place, but then it runs perfectly. I generally make very memory intensive music (loads of different vsts active all at once) and it doesn't really make a dent in the RAM.

mbenigni · Post by **mbenigni** » Tue Aug 26, 2008 6:36 pm

The MoBo is a Gigibyte and it's a P.O.S. No doubt it will run XP, but if you've got an old school installation disk without any service packs in, it will BSOD with what turns out to be a fairly common "pci.sys" error. The original plan was to dual boot w/ XP and Vista 64, but after an entire weekend shot to hell, I'm done chasing that. I've still got XP on my laptop, so at least I'm covered there.

Vista it is then. But I'm still trying to decide between 32 and 64 bit. Anybody move to x64 and experience any benefits? ie. Performance gains, performance gains w/ more than 4G RAM. Or any weirdness, 3rd party plugs aside?

Thanks.

nebulae · Post by **nebulae** » Tue Aug 26, 2008 6:41 pm

^ I honestly don't know what all the hoopla is about - I've been running XP for 7 years, no issues; my current setup is XP SP3 with 2gb of Ram, and again, no issues, no limitations, and no need for the latest/greatest.

Grifter · Post by **Grifter** » Tue Aug 26, 2008 7:11 pm

Before you give up try looking at the site below:

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/wi ... stream.asp

I have GA-X48-DS5 which runs both vista 64 and xpsp3 ( nice mobo indeed)

adventurepants_ · Post by **adventurepants_** » Tue Aug 26, 2008 11:08 pm

mbenigni wrote:The MoBo is a Gigibyte and it's a P.O.S. No doubt it will run XP, but if you've got an old school installation disk without any service packs in, it will BSOD with what turns out to be a fairly common "pci.sys" error. The original plan was to dual boot w/ XP and Vista 64, but after an entire weekend shot to hell, I'm done chasing that. I've still got XP on my laptop, so at least I'm covered there.

Vista it is then. But I'm still trying to decide between 32 and 64 bit. Anybody move to x64 and experience any benefits? ie. Performance gains, performance gains w/ more than 4G RAM. Or any weirdness, 3rd party plugs aside?

Thanks.

if the board is xp compatible, its very unlikely it will BSOD because of lack of service packs. its more likely to be a problem with the physical build (heat, static, motherboard not mounted right) or a hardware error with the board. it shouldnt take a whole weekend to figure this out. have you analysed the dump from the BSOD? it will give you some idea as to where its failing.

Live works fine on 64 bit, but not every vst or audio interface does.

mbenigni · Post by **mbenigni** » Wed Aug 27, 2008 1:18 pm

Neb, you're preaching to the converted. I'm a big XP advocate myself, but this is not the question at hand.

Did the slipstream thing, but it ultimately requires that you have a full version of Nero (or a few specific versions of Roxio) to get the resulting image onto a properly formatted bootable CD. That led to a whole adventure on its own, wherein I downloaded what CNET called a "free" copy of Nero, which then prompted for a serial number, and then I fried my laptop with malware trying to find said serial number. So in this context "free" equals a couple of days of reinstalling the contents of my laptop drive. But I digress.

adventurepants, I really doubt it's a thermal problem etc, for a number of reasons. For one, it's now dead stable running Vista, and for another, users of several boards (including Gigabyte and ASUS products) report the exact same problem, and report fixing it by way of slipstreaming XP2. As for "it shouldn't take a whole weekend" ... a tad condescending, no?

adventurepants_ · Post by **adventurepants_** » Wed Aug 27, 2008 10:39 pm

mbenigni wrote:Neb, you're preaching to the converted. I'm a big XP advocate myself, but this is not the question at hand.

Did the slipstream thing, but it ultimately requires that you have a full version of Nero (or a few specific versions of Roxio) to get the resulting image onto a properly formatted bootable CD. That led to a whole adventure on its own, wherein I downloaded what CNET called a "free" copy of Nero, which then prompted for a serial number, and then I fried my laptop with malware trying to find said serial number. So in this context "free" equals a couple of days of reinstalling the contents of my laptop drive. But I digress.

adventurepants, I really doubt it's a thermal problem etc, for a number of reasons. For one, it's now dead stable running Vista, and for another, users of several boards (including Gigabyte and ASUS products) report the exact same problem, and report fixing it by way of slipstreaming XP2. As for "it shouldn't take a whole weekend" ... a tad condescending, no?

no offence meant. i do a lot of pc work for people and im constantly surprised at how long people will spend butting their head against a wall and not getting anywhere, before taking it to a tech. I just wonder how much their time is worth to them.

it must be a problem specific to that board. ive built two pcs on Gig boards recently from a stock XP disc with no problems. glad youre up and running.

mbenigni · Post by **mbenigni** » Thu Aug 28, 2008 1:49 pm

That's cool; I see where you're coming from now. Just try to give a guy the benefit of the doubt. I've been building PC's for 20 years, sometimes professionally. (I don't usually get an opp. to brag about being old, but there it is...) In fact, my first job out of school was as a BIOS developer.

This specific BSOD was just one layer of the onion I peeled this past weekend. So many issues popped up one after another, some but not all resulting from the board shipping with an ancient BIOS on it. The EP45-DS3R also seems a bit finicky about memory timing, RAID settings (CMOS state is somewhat unpredictable between boots), the list goes on... (And then I did something legitimately stupid in the final hour and caught myself a nice virus. :O)

Anyway, back to the original topic. I've decided to run this desktop as my "bleeding edge" Vista 64 machine, probably primarily to the ends of fiddling with it and seeing how fast it will go. The XP laptop will be the machine I rely on for music and other critical work, until this new OS proves itself out.

It's about time we all move on to 64-bit anyway. After all, most of us are paying for 64-bit CPUs. I think MS really dropped the ball by releasing a 32-bit version of Vista at all. XP could have served very well as a backward compatible OS for CPUs that don't support 64-bit computing, and a new, exclusively 64-bit OS would have given people an actual compelling reason to upgrade. How they got from that obvious release strategy to releasing ~6 different flavors of Vista - none of which really improve matters - well... that's a whole new thread I guess.

derders · Post by **derders** » Thu Sep 11, 2008 6:16 pm

Hi at all, I have a question ...

under XP 32 it is so that programs can just have a max. of 2GB above is not possible...

when I run Live it gives me after a while, and much vsts a message that I cant load more.(dont know the exact message) when I look in my taskmanager Live has load 1,4-16GB +- is okay...

is it under 64 Bit the same or is that a 32bit problem ? or a max. ram /programm thing under Windows ?

would be so great to know bevor I buy a Vista .

I have 4GB in my PC and just to work with max 2gb is not good when I will use much vsts like Kontakt Player2 or Kontakt 3 by example...

can someone of you try it out or give me an answer? thank you

chaircrusher · Post by **chaircrusher** » Thu Sep 11, 2008 7:26 pm

Ableton Live is a 32-bit program. This will be a limitation even on Vista64 though I think 32-bit programs can allocate more memory than on XP. But 32-bit programs still only have a 4 gigabyte address space.

derders wrote:Hi at all, I have a question ...

under XP 32 it is so that programs can just have a max. of 2GB above is not possible...

when I run Live it gives me after a while, and much vsts a message that I cant load more.(dont know the exact message) when I look in my taskmanager Live has load 1,4-16GB +- is okay...

is it under 64 Bit the same or is that a 32bit problem ? or a max. ram /programm thing under Windows ?

would be so great to know bevor I buy a Vista .

I have 4GB in my PC and just to work with max 2gb is not good when I will use much vsts like Kontakt Player2 or Kontakt 3 by example...

can someone of you try it out or give me an answer? thank you