Here is a part of Windows Vista x64 review with link to full story. Vista was installed on 64-bit laptop and 64-bit desktop PC.
I have been running Windows Vista for the last couple of months now on my main work laptop (64-bit AMD Turion, 2Gb ram, ATI Radeon Xpress 200M graphics), which I am typing this up on now, and it’s been running on my Dual Opteron workstation (Dual 2Gz Opteron, 2Gb ram, NVidia 6600 Graphics) at home since I got it and 3 months ago. Since then I have had some minor issues with different builds, but the system works without flaw 99% of the time, if not more. There are some driver issues (namely lack of a sound driver and card reader for my laptop, and I think the issues with the noise from the Opterons may be caused by an older system driver), but this is to be expected for beta software. I haven’t had my system Crash fully in a while now with it running. I have had one or 2 graphics driver crashes, but this did not cause an issue because the graphics driver was unloaded and reloaded and the system stayed up, and everything where I left it.
There is not a lot about x64 (64-bit) I can tell you that you probably don’t already know, but the thing that interests me most about it is the fact that Vista is fully supportive of x64 (64-bit). With Windows XP, x64 did not ship at RTM time, and it was a different kernel to XP. XP was version 5.0 of the kernel, but X64 XP was 5.1, the same kernel as windows 2003 server. This is not a bad thing, as Servers are generally more stable then client machines, but it caused some issues. Also drivers where a problem. Now I know I just said I had driver issues, but if all goes to plan, these will go away. At the moment there are a lot of machines selling with x64 (or EMT64) processors, but a lot of these ship with Windows XP 32 bit edition. I hope that the release of vista will solve this problem and give us some proper support for X64 as a platform.
Tiernans Comms Closet : Windows Vista Review: Part 1: Stability, performance, x64
