Operating System

[SuperMiguel]

So for my new build which operating system should i use? WinXP 32 or 64? or Win7 32 / 64?

This is a specific workbench system, ill be running electronics emulator, and programs to program chips like avr studio or arduino IDE

[migsantiago]

I'd recommend Windows 7 Professional or Ultimate Edition (64 bits) with a Windows XP Virtual Machine (32 bits).

You could run any software/hardware by using that combination.

[Kiriakos-GR]

I do not think that you have so many options today ... Legal OS

But, I bet that you can buy XP-Pro 32bit , on ebay .

My vote goes to XP-Pro .

[Simon]

if it is just for electronics and it's not the most powerful 64 bit system with over 3.5 GB of RAM I'd go for XP 32 bit, from what I hear xp 64 bit was a bit of a fars because by then Vista was on the way and the driver coverage for XP64 was not great as manufacturers turned to vista.

many slight older and freeware programs are more likely to work on XP than vista/7

[SuperMiguel]

I have a  Q8300 cpu, with 4gb of ram, and ASUS MB and 128GB SSD

[migsantiago]

I work on Win7, 64 bit, 2GB ram, 500GB HD... it's a very reliable OS. Don't think Win7 is as bad as Vista, you should try it before discarding it.

Vista is a RAM eating monster. Win7 is not.

If you have 4GB, you will barely use virtual memory on 7.

I run heavy software such as Matlab, Labview, Altium, MPLAB, Full HD video playback, etc.

[Simon]

7 is ok but to be honest neither 7 or vista have brought anything more than XP apart from 64 bit support, if you want a snappier system and don't mind loosing 1/2 - 3/4 GB of ram go XP, if you want all the flashy stuff and the ultimate windows ad-ons like their new messenger that will "only work on 7" (so that you are forced to buy 7) go for 7

[SuperMiguel]

7 is ok but to be honest neither 7 or vista have brought anything more than XP apart from 64 bit support, if you want a snappier system and don't mind loosing 1/2 - 3/4 GB of ram go XP, if you want all the flashy stuff and the ultimate windows ad-ons like their new messenger that will "only work on 7" (so that you are forced to buy 7) go for 7

xp has a 64bit edition

[Simon]

7 is ok but to be honest neither 7 or vista have brought anything more than XP apart from 64 bit support, if you want a snappier system and don't mind loosing 1/2 - 3/4 GB of ram go XP, if you want all the flashy stuff and the ultimate windows ad-ons like their new messenger that will "only work on 7" (so that you are forced to buy 7) go for 7

xp has a 64bit edition

and I hear it has poor driver support although that may be untrue. if it is good then go for XP64 why bother with 7?

[alm]

xp has a 64bit edition

Which is basically Windows 2003 server with the server parts removed, and never had much hardware or software support. It was an OK solution when it was the only 64-bit desktop Windows version, but not today. I don't like to roll out any new Windows XP 32-bit systems either, but at least that's acceptable for old hardware or supporting legacy software. Anything needing a 64-bit OS should have no problems with Windows 7, however.

[PetrosA]

I ran XP Pro on my old box and, after some minor upgrades (very minor) I got 7 32 bit. It starts and shuts down waaaaay faster than XP and seems very stable. The difference in my CPU isn't big enough to explain the start and shutdown times, so it has to be the system. There are some drivers I haven't found yet (old Adaptec SCSI card for scanner, Fire GL 3300 GFX card, but the system has an ok driver for that) but other than that all my software has installed and run without major issues.

[JohnS_AZ]

What does Win 7 Pro have the Win 7 Premium does not?
I have XP pro now, and was considering the upgrade.

[alm]

What does Win 7 Pro have the Win 7 Premium does not?
I have XP pro now, and was considering the upgrade.

Free Windows XP virtual machine, which migsantiago mentioned, if you plan to use it. Not many other features that are useful for typical home use, I believe. I'm sure it's not hard to find comparison tables.

[Zero999]

I have XP Home and have 1GB. It hardly ever uses virtual memory. I have to load lots of large image files and have lots of browser tabs open before it uses any VM.

[.o:0|O|0:o.]

You could partition your disk space and have both or run XP SP3 from within W7, for older programs that don't like W7.

.o:0|O|0:o.

[Kiriakos-GR]

Its rare to find an very passion-ed with electronics , to be also passion-ed with computing.  

Most of them use light weight ( CPU power) PC boxes , and 2D graphics.
In this scenario , the lightweight OS , its an must have too.
Simple as that.


Personally, I had build my Quad core Q6600 box, before 48 hours ( hardware part) , and still I am with the installation CD's at hand, and I spent my time , to run all those web updates , all my software are legal.

Well  Its  hard to express with words my feelings , all this computing power, and the amazing 3D graphics with the HD5770 ,  it gives you the feeling, that you are ready to explore and enjoy just anything in the modern world of computing.  
My XP-Pro Box runs faster than ever. The new CPU drops down MHz at idle , saves energy and stays ultra cool.
My point are , that I vote the hardware, as source for real improvements than the software.
 
 

[Hewitson]

So for my new build which operating system should i use? WinXP 32 or 64? or Win7 32 / 64?

This is a specific workbench system, ill be running electronics emulator, and programs to program chips like avr studio or arduino IDE

Neither. Use an OS that actually works properly and doesn't need constant reboots and reinstalls, eg Linux/FreeBSD.

[Murphy]

Hard to say since you didn't specify what hardware it's running. If it's older scavenged hardware just to get you internet and program some chips I would use XP. If you're buying legit licenses it'll save you some cash too.

On modern hardware that's going to see heavy use go with Win7 x64. It's a really solid OS with a ton of backend improvements over XP and Vista. Using XP on a new machine is dumb unless you have a specific and good reason to do so.

Linux only really works if you're comfortable with it and the software you need is Linux compatible. Needing to find crappy hacks and half finished open source projects just to get some work done is annoying and unproductive. Then again if the desired software is available it works great and costs nothing.

[Polossatik]

64 bit OS'ses are only usefull when you're dealing with huge memory , like for example for databases, hughe photo editing or 3D modelling etc
there is no advantage in using 64bit otherwise and 64bit is in most cases even slower than 32bit

If you're used to windows then use windows a base system , otherwise use a Linux distro - you just want to get work done,

I can recommend http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/VirtualBox (it's free) , it allows you to run OS's in a virtual pc, so you can for example run Windows XP in a virtual env on a linux box (or Linux on a windows box).

Simply install the OS in the virtual pc, configure it to your liking and then take a backup of the "virtual disk" , if you screw up or have to much stuff installed simply start/restore the backup. I use this extensivly to "test" things out, to avoid a bloothed windows env.

note that with windows make sure you configure the env as you want (RAM size and so) before activating to avoid that annoying re-activation based on hardware changes

It's especially good when using different usb to serial drivers who sometimes screw up windows if all installed on the same windows install, just make a separate virtual pc for each env.

in theory virtual pc's are a bit slower, in practice - as long as you don't run heavy graphic stuff you don't see the difference, on cpu level the difference is almost zip.

[saturation]

Use the PC OS the software recommends you run.

If you have a choice between XP, Vista and Win7, choose 7 because its simply an updated Vista with all the annoyances removed.  Its also more efficient with memory.

If you have a choice between 32 and 64 bit, choose 64 bit; native 64 bit applications do run 2x faster without tweaking, and 64 bit systems can address large blocks of RAM to do large dataset processing.

[Polossatik]

native 64 bit applications do run 2x faster without tweaking,

sorry, that is not true at all, 64 bit application will NOT run twice as fast . this is a common misunderstanding

Assuming the app does not need more than 2 Gb address space (=most common applications), If you install on a certain system a 32bit Operating system and use a 32bit application then this will run just as fast (and maybe even a tiny little bit faster) as the 64 bit version of that application on the 64 bit operating system system. This is true for linux, windows, etc etc

32 bit applications on a 64bit windows system take NO advantage of the 64 bit windows os besides a better memory management allowing 32bit apps to use up to 4gb address space (in most cases) .
Running 32 bit windows applications (who need less than 2gb address space) on a 64 bit windows system will often be (a bit) slower than running the same 32 bit application on a 32 bit windows.


Only when the application actually needs more than (on windows) 3 gb of address space (= not the same as ram) then 64 bit windows is needed (assuming your application is than also a 64 bit application). By default you can go only up to 2b address space on 32bit windows, but you can up this to 3gb in most cases who need this.

On linux there is mainly a performance gain by using 64 bit linux and 64 bit applications when your application uses more than 3gb (or 4 - depends on the distro) Gb of address space because the memory management will be simpler, but it will also not run 2 times faster than a 32bit app on a 32bit Linux.

bottom line: for apps that do not need several gigabytes of address space 32bit is fine, if you use 64 bit OS then make sure you use also 64bit windows applications for the best result.

the only real BIG advantage of using 64 bit OS and applications (!) is that your application can address lot's of GB's of address space . On windows you NEED to use 64 bit for above 3gb (there is one exception - PAE but I wont go into that here) and Linux full 64 bit will be having faster/better memory management above x GB.

Edit: above a summary, there is a huge difference between OS's and there is stuff I left out to avoid more confusion and note that address space of a process (!) is the real limit here and this is not the same as ram.

32bit windows as a system can in general (there are exceptions) not use more than 4Gb of ram, 32 bit Linux can in most cases use more than 4gb of ram
If you need to buy a new windows license then get 64 bit win 7, if you have a 32bit XP license already then this is fine in most cases and buying a 64 bit windows will not bring huge benefits for most tasks.

[saturation]

Thanks for your opine, polossatik , but that's my benchmarks for apps I use, twice is typical, its often far more.  Anyone can see for themselves and see the differences using available opensource or freeware.  

Maybe the compile optimization is better on apps I use for 64, I dunno.  Maybe such a comparison is different on Linux vs Vista or Win7 multios apps that have varying optimizations, say Firefox.  Maybe its wholly per application based.  But speed is speed.

In my case, I use Vista SP2, as I have 32 and 64 bit versions.  For testing,  you can use 7.zip which is available free on both 32 and 64 bit and compress something huge that is already heavily compressed so it won't be easy to do and it'll take a lot of time, like a 1GB MKV video file, then use the most CPU intensive mode: ultra.  Also, if you have a multithread CPU make sure you use the same number of threads or it will be misleading.

You can set the word size on any application to see how it affects speed: 32 bits for 32 bit OS, 64 on 64, then try 32 bit on 64 bit OS etc.,

http://www.7-zip.org/

Test run 32 bit version on a 64 bit system, then run the 64 bit version on 64 bit OS.  Now run the 32 bit version on a 32 bit OS, and compare.  Note, you'll have to make corrections for the clock speed and any speed optimizations such as cache's you have on your boxes to normalize the operational times.

Note, on RAM usage and Pagefile, choose a test file small enough not to cause pagefile disk swap  but big enough to fill physical RAM, as times may seem slower on 32 bit.  But, Z.zip will report raw compression times based on CPU times alone, so you can control against the effects of having different caches, RAM, disk speed etc., if per chance its used.

native 64 bit applications do run 2x faster without tweaking,

sorry, that is not true at all, 64 bit application will NOT run twice as fast . this is a common misunderstanding

[saturation]

Quick test of 7.zip:

compressing a 160MB video file, on Vista SP2, z.zip version/Vista version:

32/32 =  998KB/sec
32/64 = 2300KB/sec
64/64 = 4355KB/sec

Optimized Z.zip features for 64 bit:

64/64= 6800KB/sec

[Polossatik]

cheers,
if it's 2 times fast for you, glad to hear it.

My main benchmarks are systems like Oracle RDBMS servers , web servers etc (= daily job) and there I can say the difference of speed/response of the whole system is most of the time rather small and sometimes even in favor of the 32bit env, all depending on the type of load of course. so I'm not saying there ARE no cases when 64 bit is (much) faster.

There are exceptions, Java is for example also an env where 64bit gives most of the time a better application throughput , if you will actually see this for a simple deskop Java app is another thing.

And of course with one big limitation for 32bit- scalability (= mainly due the process address size) where 64 bit is really "the way to go"

I'll have a look at 7zip and do some tests (but that will be on Linux ), most likely is is due the fact this "extreme" compression must be a heavily memory bound application and the lookup of large compression matrixes or the used register access  should be faster under 64 bit .

I doubt that when using "normal" compression the difference is that huge, simply because I/O is there a more limiting factor , which will stay the same on 32 and 64 bit (unless you have a crappy driver).

But, IMHO, the whole 32bit vs 64 bit is rather academic for most desktop users. I'm not against using 64 bit or so, but it has , on the same hardware,IMHO in general much less impact than people expect.

I see no point (unless you need the memory for some applications - applications most desktop users do not use) to shelf out extra $$ to go to 64bit if you have for example 32bit XP now. You better get a faster disk , better disk controller or upgrade the cpu or so for that $$.
with Linux of course you can simply install a 64 bit version, but again, i'm skeptic about that your whole system will be twice as fast.

[baljemmett]

Maybe the compile optimization is better on apps I use for 64, I dunno.

Might well be; the AMD64/EM64T architecture has twice as many general-purpose registers as the i386 architecture, and it's just generally rather less 'warty'.  Gives compilers a bit more breathing space.