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You can use the /3GB switch to get 3GB on XP x86, but XP x64 actually works unlike Vista x64, although it uses a little more RAM than the 32bit version of XP of course..

Explain

Well you know all this trouble with Vista - that almost no program older than a year works on it? It's worse on Vista x64..
But on XP x64 almost everything just works - except 16bit programs (which also don't work on Vista x64) but they're very rare (TSK installer is one of the few I encountered)

b.t.w. I found a way to fix krom's editor in Vista... Just copy over files from XP machine
I've got a few more, but still, indeed they are fairly rare.[/url]

Which files are those and how they are different from those on Vista PC ?

Windows XP x64 is full of bugs.. :roll:

the files are glu32.dll and opengl32.dll. copied them from my xp sp2 virtual machine to km_editor's folder. don't fully know difference in versions, but at least it works this way (at ~25 fps).

Thats part of video drivers usually.

yes. that was what was wrong with it in the first place... it was running at 1-2fps and even updating the drivers didn't work. It seems like copying over xp's drivers did do the trick.

Exaggerating are we? Most of my old software/games work completely fine on Vista. Games that had problems on XP mostly have problems even now, but System Shock 2 actually worked without any tinkering on Vista, unlike XP :shock:.
Besides, how does this differ from the Windows XP scenario, it also broke a huge deal of legacy applications, yet nowadays people are no longer whining about that?
And I don't see why Vista x64 would have lower compability than Vista x86 has when running legacy 32bit applications, have yet to encounter a single game where Vista x64 is the problem.
You know I do have a bunch of older games (Windows based) that don't run on XP at all/are unstable/require heavy tinkering.

I agree with Litude. Harold is exaggerating how bad Vista is. Almost every upgrade to an OS causes compatibility issues. If we want to move forward we have to accept this. We can't still be using XP in 100 years just because it runs all the old programs.

That said, I still don't like Vista. At the moment I way prefer XP. But compatibility is only one of the smaller issues with Vista; other things like performance, cost, etc. are important to me too.
Lewin.

Hm I'm seeing a bit of the "XP used to be bad" argument.. it's true of course, but not a valid argument. Because we don't live in the past. And right now more program are compatible with XP than with Vista. Exceptions exist but are exceedingly rare. We could accept some loss of backwards compatibility but that wouldn't help very much - only total lack of backwards compat would enable serious changes (clearly unacceptable), small changes don't help since they're small. Small cuts on compat mostly just reduce the size of the compat layer - which didn't make Vista small at all, it needs some serious trimming..

Lots of progress can also be made without major loss of compatibility.. such as from XP x86 to XP x64
But it's an other kind of progress, breaking changes are always breaking unless you add to the compat layers which will bloat things up, non breaking changes can still be good progress (like the new Explorer)

The reason Any x64 OS has lower compatibility with 32bit programs is that most 32bit programs aren't made with x64 in mind - they launch the 32bit explorer (and only install shell extensions for the 32bit explorer) and see only half the registry and refuse to save anything in the normal "Program Files" directory, things like that. It's worse when they think they have to install drivers - they just won't work then.

Sometimes it's more stupid that compatibility - I had a bug in all of my tools with several WinXP users back when I was coding on WinME. For some weird reason WinXP added extra whitespace at the end of GetCurrentDir command (e.g. "c:\windows\ "). So I had to make extra wrapper to make sure there are no whitespaces. How stupid is that

They took out 16bit programs on Vista x64 on purpose.
Paths with whitespaces on the end shouldn't matter, they are ignored.

They took the whole 16bit compatibility layer out of all 64bit windowses. Those OS's can not even enter 16bit mode by themselves and 16bit programs can not be interrupted (not without killing them) so they can easily lock up the system - before you even get a chance to kill them. And like 99% of the 16bit programs is over 10 years old.
Of course it is annoying sometimes.. but not very often
Not if you append something to it, you'd have to trim the path first (which isn't any effort compared to finding out that you have to do it, but it shouldn't be needed)