Digitalopia

I recently went through the fun (and the pain) of re-building my main Windows desktop with Vista 64-bit. It was previously used as a ‘jack of all trades’ desktop (as my primary desktop is a Mac), running XP, Vista and Linux. However, it was time I put it to a more stable use, so I decided to re-install Vista and use it as my main gaming and Windows desktop. Also, as some of its components were used to build my new Media Center (I will be writing about that build in another story), it was a good time for a full re-build with some updated parts (I also removed over 3TB of storage !)

As I had removed the memory for my Media Center build, I needed to replace it with some more. With 4GB previously, the performance of Vista was very good, but as memory pricing has reduced significantly over the last year and I wanted to start using VMware more, I decided to go for 8GB. For full support of more than 8GB, Vista 64-bit is required. Also, the AMD FX-62 chip I was using is 64-bit. Now the fun begins …

When attempting to install Vista with my original 64-bit install disk, the install would blue screen when it was completing the installation. After some google’ing, I found it was a known problem where Vista would not install with more than 3GB of memory. It seems that a patch is required to allow the Vista kernel to boot with more than 3GB RAM. I have previously only installed Vista on 2GB machines, so the error had not occurred before. Considering I have 4 x 2GB SIMMS (dual channel) it was not possible for me to only install 2GB. I could remove 2GB from another computer, install Vista and the patch and then re-install the 8GB. However, this is less than satisfactory, so I looked for an alternative.

As this issue is fixed in Vista Service Pack 1, I decided to look at creating a SP1 install disk. This required me to slipstream the Vista install disk with SP1 and burn a new disk. I will be including details of this process in another article. It is interesting that such a fundamental flaw would have been present in the official release of Vista. With Vista 64-bit, its primary use is for users with more than 3GB of RAM. As Vista it cannot be installed on these computers (without first patching the install) it seems a very big omission by Microsoft.

Vista SP1 64-bit installed with the full 8GB and so far (fingers-crossed) I have had no problems.

In a move that may confuse some people, Adobe have announced that the next release of Photoshop CS4 will be 64-bit for Windows, but only 32-bit for the Mac.

Digging deeper into the story reveals it is linked to Apple’s recent announcement that they will no longer be developing a 64-bit version of Carbon, and will concentrate instead on Cocoa. Carbon and Cocoa are 2 Mac API’s for developing OSX applications. Apple has been trying to drop Carbon support for some time and fully concentrate on Cocoa. However, many applications that have been available on the Mac for a long time were originally developed using Carbon (as Cocoa is a relatively new API). This has previously impacted Microsoft, who had to update large parts of Microsoft Office 2008, and now Adobe has indicated that they would need to update or review up to a million lines of code to be fully Cocoa compliant. Obviously a tall order, and it seems that they may well take a few versions of Photoshop to complete the migration.

A very thorough description and analysis can be found over at CNET.

The biggest issue that will face photographers is the ever-growing size of image files. With a 32-bit operating system, only 4GB can be used by a single application. It is not unknown for Photoshop to use much more memory when working with images with multiple layers. Also, as more Mac’s may be able to support 8GB or 16GB of memory in a couple of years, such a restriction may be too much for some Mac users.