It's been a very stable and uneventful six months using Vista 64 bit on my Dell D830.  Which is great, compared to my previous 1 year.   I expected some major problems that would make me regret running 64-bit but surprisingly there haven't been any, with the exception of some minor issues.  Things just work.  Unlike my d820 which was plagued with major and minor hardware issues, my d830 has been trouble-free.  As for the software, I've had no trouble installing any piece of software on Vista x64 (e.g Visual Studio 2008, SQL Server 2005,  Money, Office, TurboTax, Ruby, Python, Netbeans,  VIM,  uTorrent, iTunes, LiveMeeting, WebEx, etc).  I keep waiting for something to go wrong but so far so good. 

The best part of using Vista 64-bit is that my applications have access to all 4GB of RAM, which is useful since I spend a lot of time in my resource hungry VSTS virtual machine.   But these days, 4GB is not enough!  I routinely have Outlook and Firefox running.  Sometimes I find that my VSTS VM [to which I've allocated about 1.5GB RAM] can't start due to lack of available RAM, which then forces me to terminate Outlook and/or FF.  It's kinda sad when 4GB is not enough on a laptop.  Good thing this summer will bring laptops that will have wide support for 8GB of RAM.  Apparently the Dell Precision m6300 already support 8GB RAM (wish I knew that earlier) and even my current d830 can handle 8GB but it will be "unsupported". 

 

So here are some relatively minor issues I've had:

  • Canon hasn't released RAW image support for Vista x64.  Not a big deal since I don't shoot RAW except for experimenting.
  • Microsoft's Remote Access Portal doesn't seem to like the built-in smartcard reader.  This is annoying since I'm a field employee and I became accustomed to accessing internal application directly over the internet w/o the hassle of using VPN.  BTW, the smartcard reader works, just not with RAP.
  • That's it, so far.

Here's to many more months of boring stability and things just working!