Seeking Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit advice

[AlanS17]

Well I'm stepping into uncharted waters here (at least for me). I just got a warranty replacement laptop from Dell and it's got an AMD Turion 64 X2 processor (64 bit dual core). It came with Windows XP (32 bit), but I just ordered a replacement OS in the form of Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit. So this is my first experience with 64 bit hardware, dual core hardware, Vista, and a 64 bit OS.

Anybody know any good software/hardware to get for a Vista 64 bit system? The Ultimate version includes media center capability, but this laptop doesn't have any such hardware. Anyone know of a 64bit-capable video input solution for a laptop? Anything that can do HD output is a bonus. I've got VGA out, but that's about it.

FWIW, this laptop isn't absolute top-of-the-line, but it can handle Vista Aero (if that makes any difference on suggestions). It has 4 USB 2.0 ports, a PCMCIA slot and a SD/SDIO/MMC slot. I already ordered a 4GB SD card to use Vista ReadyBoost, but I'm up for suggestions for SDIO devices. Before today, I'd never even heard of SDIO. And any PCMCIA devices would be cool.

When it comes to hardware, the hard part will be finding something with 64 bit drivers. Vista won't even allow me to use unsigned, non-64 bit drivers.

Oh, and one more thing... Where can I find 64 bit bluetooth drivers for a generic USB bluetooth device? I don't know if they come with Vista or not. Right now I use BlueSoleil, but I've heard it's not Vista compatible.

[tommy]

I just installed Win XP Pro X64, i was surprised that my old video card still worked right on startup with not having to find drivers. (Radeon 9200) I also found a X64 version of firefox that works well also.

Other than that and a few programs that are not supported everything seems fine. (with XP X64 anyway)

I use two hard drives for 32bit Windows and X64, if anything will not run on the X64 version i can always go back to a 32bit OS.

I rarely go into my X64 drive unless i want to do something very specific for gaming to take advantage of it.

[AlanS17]

Well the hard drive has room to spare for my needs. Maybe a dual-boot system is the way to go. I don't play many PC games, though. If I had a second partition, it probably wouldn't have another Windows OS on it. Maybe Linux? But even then, I've heard that Vista Ultimate has some sort of UNIX environment.

What to do. What to do... 

[Samstag]

Vista doesn't have a Unix environment, but it has "virtual machines" that would let you run Unix/Linux if you like.  I think you allocate a chunk of space in an existing partition rather than using a separate partition, which can be deleted later if you don't like it.

Bluetooth seems to be supported natively in Vista.  I just installed the Business edition and earlier this morning installed a Dell Bluetooth dongle and keyboard/mouse.  I never saw any driver installation windows or acknowledgement of any kind so I was pretty surprised when it all worked without any configuration or drivers.

So far I'm pretty impressed with all the built-in hardware support in Vista.  I just put together a [pretty close to] bleeding-edge system and didn't have to install a single driver to get everything working, including RAID-5.

[AlanS17]

Well my biggest hardware concern was whether or not I'd have enough RAM for Aero. I have the requisite 1GB of RAM, but it's partially shared with the onboard graphics card (which wants to take 256MB). So before I went to bed last night, I bought 2GB of RAM online. That ought to easily cover it. Now it's just a matter of waiting for all my parts to get here.

I'm glad to hear about the driver support for BlueTooth. I wonder if that's just for generic USB devices or if I might be able to find a compatible mini-pci or SDIO card. Does Vista have its own built-in BlueTooth profiles? What does it natively support?

[Samstag]

I'm glad to hear about the driver support for BlueTooth. I wonder if that's just for generic USB devices or if I might be able to find a compatible mini-pci or SDIO card. Does Vista have its own built-in BlueTooth profiles? What does it natively support?

I'd guess that Vista will probably recognize mini-pci/SDIO/PCMCIA Bluetooth, but if possible find out if the device specifically says wether it will work with Vista.  If they don't say, it'll probably work anyway.

Vista definitely works with HID devices.  Beyond that I can't say, but I'll see if I can find out more later.  I can test a phone headset and GPS device, but I'm expecting them to work without any issues.