Requirements for 64 bit

[Lord Slyther]

Hi. I would like to know which requirements there are for a 64 bit computer even when it holds 6 GB of RAM. I can't install Net Framework 2.0, because it only supports 32 bit. I load the CS, and GOD, it crashes every time I try to look at an NPC's face and edit it!! But it's not allowing me! Even when I play Oblivion(hooray for ultra high quality to be as smooth as it is!!), everything's so damn bizarre and spikey in game! There's messed up textures, and meshes everywhere! If anybody has 64 bit like I do now, how do I mod for Oblivion with no crash issues, or no gameplay issues? If anybody can help me through all this, it would be much of great help!

 

:thanks:

 

Lord Slyther

[billypnats]

try using compatibility mode?

[Varus Torvyn]

They didn't code in a backward-compatibility worth mentioning into the 64-bit OS versions. It's like trying to run a 16-bit screensaver on 32-bit XP - isn't going to happen without some heavy tweaking. XP expects screensavers to be 32-bit (saved in System32 folder).

 

Slyther, does your OS have those Properties windows like 32-bit XP does, where you can force the OS to run a program in an older OS mode? XP 32-bit will go back to Win 98 OK, but it begins to act a little hinky if you choose Win 95.

 

Not much call for 64-bit ops right now Slyther, and there's little in the way of 3rd-party software support. I think it's going to be quite a long time before the industry makes the jump from 32-bit to 64-bit. I think 32-bit will remain the status quo for a while.

[giskarduk]

Ignore this is your an XP user, you didnt actually say so im posting anyway just in case.

 

I actually made a long news post on my website about 64bit vista and problems, and posted a fair few solutions too. Its very long so dont expect a short read. Anyway, here is a cut and paste, it contains all my waffle about vista 64 as well as the solutions so just ignore any parts your not interested in.

 

For the record the vista 64 desktop theme grabs the mouse focus whilst oblivion is playing and crashes oblivion out so one of the biggest ways to improve stability is to drop back to win95 style themes. The other is to get rid of that side bar which causes the same problem.

 

I searched online many times to find if somebody else had posted about this but nobody has, so it may be oblivion specific or people may not recognise the problem as theme related. But its a thank disabling the themes 50% of my crashes, disabling the side bar cured the other 50%.

 

Other solutions and workaround for vista are below but that stuff above is the main stuff that you should try right away if your a vista user.

 

 

Living with Vista 64

 

I am going to tell you now of my experiences with Vista 64 and explain some tweaks I had to make to get everything running as I wanted it. After making these changes, Vista became a much more friendly OS to use and I rather like it now. Vista's biggest claim to fame is it is the easiest OS to install I have ever used but the problems appear after installation but most can be solved with a little effort.

First a brief history of moaning about new Operating systems.

 

Love it or hate it, Vista is the current OS from Microsoft and will be the Operating system they support until June 2010 when Windows 7 appears. XP is to remain on sale until that time on low end machines now after the third climb down by Microsoft over XP since Vista was released.

 

Until 64 bit Operating systems prove them selves people will believe what ever they want. Fact is Win2000 was a test bed for XP stuff, people stayed with Win98 and WinME rather than risk using it for exactly the same reasons people do not use Vista.

 

Vista in turn will become a test bed for Windows 7 now and will give hardware makers something to write the drivers for so when Windows 7 comes out and supports vista drivers, it will not suffer with the driver issues all new Operating systems face because it wll be backwards compatible with vista and the 2 year gap would have allowed many of us users to go out and by hardware they does work with vista and thus will work with Windows 7.

 

But the initial change from a 32 bit operating system to XP 64 was not done well, drivers where a mess and people remember that. Vista is better than that but old hardware has still not had new drivers writen for it by the companies that made that hardware but this is not a problem unique to vista. Even XP suffered with tha with digital cameras not working on XP because the drivers where writen for win98 and never updated after the camera went on sale.

 

Theres a lesson here, even good companies become crap companies over time and crap companies improve and become good. So you must check to see if a company updates its drivers online frequently or if they release drivers once every 4 years like creative labs because of thats the case, you may well never get a driver for Vista from them.

 

Anyway this stuff happens all the time, especially when new operating systems come out and its often a case of buying new hardware to avoid issues and dumping the old.

Some Tips and information for new Vista users.

 

Ram requirements.

 

Vista at default uses 1.1gig of ram to load up at boot time. Within 5 minutes of the desktop loading that goes up to 1.3 gig of ram. But ram for the new hardware is cheap right now, you can buy 4 gig for less than £100 where as for XP it cost me about £150 for 2 gig when I built that system and Vista LOVES 4 gig for ram, its a really nice amount of ram for Vista if your a Gamer. You could use Vista on 2 gig but most games like a gig to them selves at least these days and Vista would not leave a whole gig for the game and that would leave you on the Virtual memory (caching to disk constantly). I think 3 Gig may be ok for a year or so until games get even bigger with blue ray becoming more common.

 

Finding Drivers and learning about problems BEFORE you buy vista or new hardware.

 

New hardware usually has Vista drivers, even 64 bit ones but anybody that upgraded to XP will tell you that not all companies make new drivers for old hardware or good drivers for new hardware, so the problem vista has with drivers for old stuff is not unusual, it happens every time there is a new OS release.

 

Sticking with good reliable companies that release regular updates and support new tech quickly is how to avoid problems but companies that do that one minute, may stop the next and become bad companies, so you must keep an open mind, not become a fan boy and look to see if a companies standards are slipping before choosing their products.

 

When buying new hardware or assessing what hardware will need replacing you find no special expert knowledge is required. Just go to google and type this.

 

"Vista 64" AND "Drivers" AND "name of the hardware you want drivers for".

 

If you get a hit and see a download, that hardware will work on Vista, if you do not, it may have problems. If you want to know if hardware works well with vista, type this.

 

"Vista 64" AND "name of the hardware you want drivers for".

 

Try it for the creative labs sound cards especially, Creative Labs used to be a good company but over the years like so many other companies, things have changed, standards have slipped. Where as other companies that used to have a terrible reputation like ATI, now have a pretty good reputation. Even Nvidias outstanding reputation during the TNT2/early Gforce days has slipped considerably so this search is perhaps the most important one since it will reveal any problems you will encounter that others are already suffering with.

 

Just remember to check the date of any reports, people love to moan but not many come back and say its fixed. So if all problems suddenly stop getting reported in 2006, then you can take that as a sign it was fixed at that time.

Windows Live Messenger Problem 81000306 Error.

 

Windows Live Messenger will not work very well with Vista 64.

 

Yes have a good laugh (I did). Microsoft make the only chat program that I use that does not work with Microsoft Windows Vista 64, continue reading when you manage to climb back in to your computer chair and have dried your eyes :)

 

It is a problem I have noticed got reported in the Vista Beta 2 days that Microsoft never fixed. Here is the error and the advice that worked for me cut and pasted here.

 

The error I got was related to Messenger not finding the server and is error 81000306 which is reported when the program eventually times out and gives up trying.

 

This is what I did to solve the problem.

 

Try this:

- Click start

- Type: cmd

- Right-click cmd.exe when it appears under Applications

- Click Run As Administrator

- Type the following: netsh int tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled

- Press enter

- Restart your computer

 

To check autotuning is disabled repeat the above but type: netsh int tcp

show global.

Security Alerts

 

Another thing that pops up is the Security center warnings so to turn those off click on the red shield on the task bar with the white cross on it, then on the left of the security centre you will see "change the way the security center alerts me" or words to that effect. Change it too "Do not alert me but display the Icon". This will allow you to see the security status of your computer without it crashing out your games.

User Access Control: The new firewall to keep you off your own computer.

 

User Access Control or UAC is new feature on vista, it basically is a user permissions system but its implimation is the worst I have ever seen in my life. Even when logged in as administrator you have to suffer with constant popups asking of you really want to run a program and that is something you should never see as an adminisator logged in to your own admin account, other users should yes, but not you when your the admin. In the end it becomes a kind of like a firewall that is designed to stop the owner of a computer from using his own machine.

 

Only microsoft could take a simple User Access system and screw it up this badly. This actualy puts people off buying the OS because it is so IN YOUR FACE. A real shot in the foot for microsoft. Had they done a better job, it would have been totally transparant but they did not, and it is not. Its not that such a system is not needed, it is, its just a terrible way to do it.

 

So the advice I recieved upon installing Vista from other users turned out to be good advice and this is it. If your just a gamer using your own machine for your own stuff, then just turn off the User Access Control.

 

This is how you do it.

 

Click on the windows logo where the start button used to be. Open the control panel and find User Accounts and family safety, click on it. Now find and click on User accounts. Then look down the list until you see "Turn User Account Control on or off"

 

Turn it off to get rid of that annoying Vista feature.

Windows Side Bar: Known to Amiga owners as the Dock way back in 1990.

 

Yes windows has taken nearly 2 decades to do it but it finally adopted one of the Amigas rather nice features that miggy fans knew as the DOCK Tray and DOCK Icons. Only, on the Amiga, you could put any program on them. Windows version is clearly more Web2.0 aware but a lack of imagination by those writing the apps so far made this feature nothing but eye candy really. A little more windows specific programming and more useful Web content would be nice here.

 

As with all things Windows related, Microsoft managed to screw it up and the side bar or programs running on it keep trying to grab the window focus. That is the technical term for making it self or one of its programs the active window.

 

That means if your typing in a text editor, suddenly your typing in the side bar, if your playing a game, the windows mouse point will appear and more often than not, the game will crash as it suddenly acts like you alt tabbed to the desktop either you did or not.

 

Also if you turn off the side bar then play a game, I found the problem often persists. I found if you turn off the side bar right away after booting everything is ok, if you reboot without loading the side bar, everything is ok. But if you just quit the side bar after using it, things are not ok. You will find it almost impossible to play games without some problems appearing.

Directx 10 and Vista.

 

Did you know that some Directx9 games refuse to work on vista because Microsoft didnt actually put backwards compatible DLLs in with the Directx 10 install that got installed with Vista ? Nor did I until Medieval 2 Total War popped up with a missing Dx9 DLL and I manually updated Directx 10 from the Microsoft website to fix it.

 

After that the games worked fine.

 

But here is the interesting thing, one of the many climb downs Microsft did over Vista was to remove the user authentication requirements but to get the update you must authenticate Vista. So it is still a requirement even if they do it a different way.

 

A Rose by any other name is still Rose Microsoft and authentification is still intrusive.

Copy Protection, Vista and Sata.

 

I really do not know the exact cause of this but it seems many older copy protection systems either dislike vista or dislike sata. Securerom is one of those systems. So to give your self a chance of being able to install your favourite games or utilities, keep an old IDE DVD drive fitted in case of problems. I found this was the only way I could reintall Oblivion. Oblivions protection system dislikes my Asus Sata DVD RW totally during the install, it works fine from it after installation but the protection clicks in at install time mostly and thats when the problems appear.

Performance and Games

 

New hardware like a full Sata system on a mid range motherboard that supports mostly sata not IDE and mid range graphics card, ram and cpu will make vista fly and really make XP look like the old donkey it is.

 

Here is my system (taken from my Xfire profile).

 

Giskard Home Built Comp

 

Intel® Core2 Quad CPU Q6600 @ 2.40GHz (4 CPUs), ~2.4GHz

4094MB RAM

Hard Drive 300 GB+

Video Card: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT

Monitor: 19inch LCD Hyundai

Sound Card: ASUS Xonar D2

Windows Vista™ Home Basic Service Pack 1

 

The creative sound cards are poorly supported on Vista but the Asus Xonar ones work great. However I found the sound driver does not always load up for a game automatically, sometimes you must quit the game and relaunch it to get the audio working 100%. But if you wanted a sound card for Vista, my research indicates the Asus Xonar is really your best choice but its operation is far from perfect, it works great, sounds great but there is a degree of fiddling around with settings involved here.

 

I found Vista actually handles Quad core CPUs rather well and I monitored it for a bit and noticed all the CPUs where sharing the load for all the things I ran on vista. Which may explain why Dual/quad cores feel better on vista to me than they did on XP. Then again, it might be my imagination.

 

If your thinking about getting an Nvidia 8600 card and own a Nvidia 7600 card, your going to be downgrading your performance in order to get Directx 10 support. Also the Nvidia 8800 GTS is about £50 more than the Nvidia 8800 GS but gives roughly the same performance in game as its cheaper GS brother. So you can use the £50 you saved to get more ram on the GS version and end up with a better card than the GTS version. Nice one Nvidia, next can we have a top end card for £50 and can you sell the 8300 for £400 please, thanks :)

 

Nvidia drivers have seriously sucked for a long time now and all the benchmarks have in the past put them a head because they reduced the imagine quality knowing benchmarking didnt test the quality of the imagine, just the frame rates. And millions of players got suckered by those benchmarks. Today the 8800 series are not only directx10 compatible but improve the imagine quality over the older nvidia range but in my opinion are still not up to ATIs standards. Frame rates are still good though.

 

The above system uses hand picked hardware that I built but it allows me to run all games in max resolution with max detail without suffering.

 

Finishing up.

 

If you meet Vistas requirements, eg as much ram as you can give it usually. Then Vista is actually a very nice OS. But it would be mistake to say it is problem free. As you can see above, even with brand new hardware, problems do exist but there are work arounds for most of them and those work arounds are not really difficult to do either.

 

They just make a total mokery of an operating system thats clearly designed to be easy and is easy to use until the installation is finished, then all the crap rises up and makes it a painful experience. Suddenly you need computer experience to put things right and that means all the good vista did is lost instantly.

 

Still with the help of anybody with some computer experiece, vista can become a joy to use. Like I said, its not hard, its just annoying to have to do these things because the default suck so badly.

 

I think probably the most annoying thing left for me is that 7zip does not add the "add to archive" option to the right click menu on vista as it did on XP and Faststone does not add the resize image option to the right click menu either. I admit to using both of those pretty heavily so I miss those things a great deal.

 

Try a search on google for Faststone and 7zip, both are free, and both are good programs.

 

Edit: Turning off all the fancy vista themes and going classic finally cured the last of the dropping to desktop issues during the times I was playing various games.

[Lord Slyther]

Ok, I got Windows XP 64 bit, and I'll copy all this down as you said earlier.

[Varus Torvyn]

Slyther, when XP SP3 was released, Microsoft made a statement that they would support XP until 2014. I have researched that on their website, so I know it's true. In fact, I told nVidia Customer Support about that, and they have confirmed it.

[Brummfondel]

Hi, just dropping in to say, there is an Framework for XP64. Filename reads: NetFx64.exe (That is the framework you where talking about isn't ist?)

Don't have a link right now, but you should be able to find it.

I remember when i first installed XP64, had some searches to do back then.

 

Good luck.

[Lord Slyther]

Hi, just dropping in to say, there is an Framework for XP64. Filename reads: NetFx64.exe (That is the framework you where talking about isn't ist?)

Don't have a link right now, but you should be able to find it.

I remember when i first installed XP64, had some searches to do back then.

 

Good luck.

 

Thank-you.

 

I'll see if it works with that then.

 

UPDATE : I have the x64 compatible version of Net Framework 2.0, and I managed to get around the crash in CS. Now for the gameplay. It's still bizzare and spikey(the very reasons why RoM on YouTube is paused), and how am I suppose to continue my machinima if all I get is bizarre gameplay? Anyway, I could use much more of your help, guys.

 

Thanks again!

[QQuix]

Cant help you, but maybe I can give you some hope…

 

I use XP Pro x64 since Jan/2008. Started playing Oblivion in Feb. Started modding in April. Released my first mod in June.

 

Never had any particular problem, except for a couple of CS crashes that I am getting used to and I can avoid.

As far as I remember, I didn’t do anything special during installations of Oblivion, CS, OBSE or OBBM. Just followed the instructions and all worked fine.

 

If there is anything I can help (like compare some Oblivion or Windows settings) just let me know.