Actinic on a 64bit pc

[pixelhaus]

Has anyone had any problems running Actinic on a 64bit pc running xp pro ?

[grantglendinnin]

Has anyone had any problems running Actinic on a 64bit pc running xp pro ?

I was going to ask this question yesterday morning as we just got a nice new computer in the office and would prefer to run 64-bit XP Pro on it.

[gabrielcrowe]

64 bit vista/xp/7 will quite happily run 32 bit applications.

in order to get bonuses from execution times, and cpu features etc, you'd need the app to be compiled in a 64 bit executable.

perhaps actinic could instruct their compilers to do so?

[gabrielcrowe]

many apologies for completely lying to you about xp-64:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows...al_x64_Edition

there are compatibility issues, but the silver lining is:

"The primary benefit of moving to 64-bit is the increase in the maximum allocatable system memory (RAM). A single process on a 32-bit Windows operating system is limited to a total of 3,25 gigabytes. "

[pixelhaus]

If it wasn't for Actinic, I'd stay with my Mac for everything. And, yes I do know i can run Windows with parallels but I prefer the full keyboard of a separate pc.

[grantglendinnin]

Theoretically any software written to be compatible with the 64-bit architecture will (for countless reasons) run faster on a 64-bit machine. Whether or not Actinic intend to release a 64-bit version of the software, or can amend the current software to do so, is beyond me - though the changes are substantial, so I highly doubt it. Another for the wish list I think.

[pixelhaus]

Ok then, so for the sake of the thing just working, I've got to go with a 32bit OS which means a maximum of 4gb of memory, running on xp pro. So before I make a decision could anyone tell me if a dual core chip running at a higher clock speed would be preferable to a quad core chip at a lower clock speed for yer 'run of the mill' CS4 type apps, oh and Actinic. I don't do any video work or 3D rendering either.

[Duncan Rounding]

I use standard 32bit XPPro with 4gb. Windows will address about 3.2Gb max. I use CS2 quite a bit but not with very large files.

I have just refurbished one of my development PCs with a 3GHz dual core and find it certainly fast enough for the purpose. Unless you are doing intensive work with very parge files I would doubt that you will see much speed difference between 32bit/64 bit of dual/quad core. The processing power will be faster - but then how much are you really 'processing'?

(Apart from loads of RAM the biggest boost for CS is to have a CS page file on a seperate drive to windows if you are using very large files)

If you really want a rocket then consider an i7 processor.

[pixelhaus]

All my heavy duty image editing gets done on a mac anyway, so just 'light duties' for the pc I think. I've looked at the i7 processors, but Dell's offerings in this department leave much to be desired. Too much 'eye candy' and not enough substance in the other components. Aimed squarely at gamers.