That was the worst pun ever and I totally didn't mean it. Oh? Explain why, World of Warcraft, I play it and my stats would tell me that I have played for around four days so far - at one point it was taking over my life, but it seems to be settling down again. Anyway, as it has been so damn quiet on the news front and general stuff-to-play-with front, I thought I would share a small observation I think I made. World of Warcraft was taking far too long to exit and being the patient person I am I pressed Control-Alt-Delete. Task manager sprung up, as expected and I was confronted with my list of running processes. As we already know, 32bit applications will appear as say Doom3.exe*32 well World of Warcraft appeared as Wow.exe - is it actually running in 64bit? I'll double check again today.

Been pretty quiet on the x64 front, but I have had plenty to do - my server, the one that hosts http://www.osnn.net has been having some kind of problem that we are having trouble looking...

The buzz of 64bit is wearing off a little now, which isn't a bad thing - it means I am using a brand new 64bit Operating System and so much of it is working - apart from the increased speed which you also get used to - that it just feels like any old WindowsXP system. I haven’t had any new drivers installed, in fact I leaked the 76.71 set I got the other day to a few places and the general feedback seems to be good, there seems to be a few issues with SLI setups, but that is even the case with the 32bit versions - it isn't something that I can check as I don't have an SLI setup, donations anyone?

I got my uxtheme.dll cracked as I mentioned in my previous blog, was a little bit of hassle and I always like to tip-toe around a new Operating System until I am comfortable with it - there is nothing worse than getting a true STOP error ... not even BSOD covers the frustration this can cause. I had to boot into Safe Mode and rename the existing uxtheme.dll (I went for the old classic...

A busy weekend with lots of alcohol, multiple kebabs and a little progress with Windows x64.

Firstly, I managed to get my hands on some new NVIDIA Forceware drivers for Windows x64 in the shape of version 76.71 which are newer than the last leaked version for 32 bit (although I know build 80.xx is already well into development), anyway here is some information which I am frankly chuffed with. I ran some tests using the Half-life 2 VST, which is available on the menu of Counter-strike: Source. The highest score I ever received with the default settings was around 110 frames per second, so here we go:

Forceware64 71.84 - VST Score: ~70
Forceware64 76.71 - VST Score: ~147

This was done using a single Geforce 6800 Ultra at 425/1100 if anyone cares! Just about all the games I have installed seem to work fine with these, no apparent slowdowns, the games I have check so far currently include (as well as being mentioned below but now at least run...

WindowsXP x64 eh? Oh go on then, let’s give it a go. What’s the worst that could happen? If I format now I will be back up and running in around half an hour.

After the usual preparations - saving my documents, favourites to another partition, backing up a years worth of mail to what looks like a freakishly small .pst and anything I thought I might be able to salvage from my Program Files folder - I was ready to say goodbye to WindowsXP and the world of 32bit Operating Systems. Of course I am well accustomed to installing Windows so made sure I had as many drivers as possible available for that first boot into WindowsXP x64.

Due to a series of tragic efforts by me, installing Windows these days is not an easy task. Firstly, about a year ago as part of my mission to have a fantastic looking custom case I removed the floppy drive and to prove my dedication I also cut the floppy cable from the power supply but then who uses a floppy these days? SATA users would be...