I am wondering if anyone has any experience with using 64bit XP vs 64bit Vista and running 3GB of ram in PS? Is it worth the effort? As an aside if there is any further thoughts on XP vs Vista that's of interest as well. I am building a new PC and need to order an OS. The MOBO will take 8GB of Ram which I will buy in the hopes that some day PS will use more then 3GB.
CS3 had a few initial quirks. For example it takes about 1 minute to load a RAW file if you have a network printer set up to be connected all the time.
Other than that it is rock solid, I haven't had any problems with it whatsoever.
In saying that, I don't find anything to be faster then when I ran XP w/2GB RAM. No denying I like Vista and have no regrets going with it. But from a photo work point of view I'm experiencing no benefits whatsoever. To be honest if I had my time over, I think I'd get a Mac.
If you already have a copy of the XP x64 then there really is no reason to buy Vista 64. You really won't recognize a difference in performance (and Vista still might have few remaining bugs). If you need to buy one or the other, you might as well buy Vista because it will cost about the same, perform about the same, but will have a longer useful life (updates, upgrades, new drivers, etc.).
Great article. In short, CS3 is a 32 bit app. Total memory allocated to CS3 is limited by that.... but by running a 64 bit OS you can have more available RAM to the OS for things like the page file. I run XP64 with 8 gigs. I can allocate the full ~3.25 gigs to photoshop and put my page file entirely in RAM and not even touch the hard drive.
It makes for a very snappy experience. For the price or RAM these days... you can't go wrong.
As far as XP vs Vista goes (64 bit versions) there seems to be more drivers available for Vista 64 since it is the newer generation and XP 64 never caught on. Although I have not had any devices I could not find drivers for. Just do a little research on color correcting with Vista before you make the leap.
