64 Bit Woes...........

Well after a hiatus of a few months where I have been a bit busy with work unrelated to Vista of anything similar I have finally bitten the bullet and bought a shiny copy of Vista Ultimate 64Bit Version, yes the 64 Bit Version! I had heard all the issues with Drivers with the 64 Bit version but after checking up on the motherboard I was going to buy and the graphics card I had I was confident all would be fine.
How wrong I was, the system I had been using on 32 Bit vista was fine, but the processor wasn’t great, memory upgradability wasn’t great, and I hadn’t had my AGP based graphics card for long. So I picked a motherboard that supported a lot of RAM and AGP, and it turned out to be an AMD based board, but luckily I could get an Athlon 64x2 (AM2) processor to go with the motherboard so all should have been fine. Vista installed, no problems reported with the hardware apart from the AGP based card, I had the 64 Bit Vista drivers downloaded already, everything installed nicely, rebooted as prompted, and then the drivers failed. The AGP card was back in PCI mode. So after trying to install other versions of the drivers and ripping them out completely a lot of research uncovered that I could disable one of the cores in the dual core processor and everything would work perfectly, I did this using MSCONFIG, then let windows install the Microsoft version of the drivers. After a reboot everything was fine, and now that it is I will be imaging the machine, and quickly. Interestingly enough the small amount of software I have put on there works perfectly, and fast (although I only have a proxy server and SSH server installed so far). Next comes all the stuff I had the 32 Bit version set up to do such as serving content to my XBOX 360 via the media center, but there will be more about that in my non-work blog which is quite sparse at the moment.