Windows XP Professional x64 Edition RC1 tested

Kai Schmerer ZDNet Germany

Published: 05 Jan 2005

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Installation and driver support

Release Candidate 1 of Windows XP Professional x64 Edition installed without problems on our test system, taking approximately half an hour. Fortunately the new Windows -- in contrast to the 32-bit version -- supports a lot of newer hardware without the need for special drivers to be installed.

The test system comprises an Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe Nforce4 motherboard, an Nvidia GeForce 6800GT PCI Express graphics card, a Seagate EIDE hard disk and a Matshita DVD-ROM. The motherboard hosts dual Gigabit LAN controllers from Nvidia and Marvell, and an appropriate driver must be installed for the Nvidia chip. Although 32-bit applications run without problems under 64-bit Windows, appropriate 64-bit device drivers must be present. You cannot install 32-bit drivers under Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.

Fortunately, 64-bit drivers already exist for the most important hardware components -- AMD's Web site lists the current 64-bit drivers for the Windows and Linux platforms. However, it may take several years for the level of driver support to reach that of 32-bit Windows today. Naturally, drivers are more likely to be available for newer and more popular hardware: whether older devices will ever be supported under 64-bit Windows remains to be seen.

Antivirus software, browser plug-ins, games, 16-bit programs
Because of missing 64-bit support, active virus protection for email is currently only available with Avast Antivirus 4.5 and McAfee Enterprise 8.0i. All other virus protection programs offer only a manual virus scan of your data at the moment -- incoming email is not examined. The other antivirus software vendors are expected to have their 64-bit versions ready when Windows XP Professional x64 Edition ships.

As far as browser plug-ins are concerned, 64-bit versions of Flash, Shockwave and Java VM should be present when Windows XP Professional x64 Edition ships. The Microsoft .Net Framework is already available in beta as a 64-bit version. If other plug-ins are missing, it's not the end of the world: Release Candidate 1 comes with a 32-bit version of Internet Explorer, which works with current 32-bit plug-ins without problems. The same goes for the recently released Firefox browser. As a result, switching to the 64-bit version of Windows should not cause any degradation of your Internet experience.

The situation is different with games -- particularly newer ones with copy protection systems. For example, we could not start DTM Race Driver 2 because the driver for the copy protection (Starforce) is present only as a 32-bit version.

16-bit programs do not run
Anyone who still uses older 16-bit programs can forget about running them under 64-bit Windows. However, some 32-bit applications use 16-bit code during installation, which means that these programs cannot be installed. This might cause some nasty surprises. For example, the Ziff-Davis Business and Content Creation Winstone benchmarks cannot be installed under 64-bit Windows because of their 16-bit install routines.

• Introduction


• Installation & driver support


• Performance


• Driver performance


• 3D games performance


• Conclusion

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