It is astonishing how slow the industry is to port 64 bit apps for XP x64, especially considering I have no intention of upgrading to Vista x64 in any of its flavours when it is available. Ok, fair enough I can live without most apps being ported, but when it comes to drivers like for for my mobile phone and TV tuner card I get annoyed.
I recently undertook the task of backing up my DVD collection to my home media server and chose divx to compress the files now that it can preserve 5.1 sound. First I found that DivX Converter was not only lacking 64 bit support but didn’t even make use of my dual processor system! Dr DivX did a slightly better job, making use of the SMP fully but still 32 bit…and these are exactly the kind of tasks that could use the massively better number crunching power of a native 64 bit application.
It would be nice to see 64 bit Dreamweaver, Photoshop and Illustrator too, but I guess I may as well keep dreaming there. Its not all bad I guess, when I want a taste of the power under the hood I can always boot into Fedora for the 64 bit experience and for the most part compile what I need natively. If the above mentioned apps were ported to Linux perhaps problems would be solved, but there doesn’t seem to be any sign of that for the moment.
Tags: Microsoft
