As noted in my last post, my development machine died a sudden death last week.

Before heading out to get a new drive enclosure, I jumped on the Dell Outlet website and found a nice Precision T3400 that had Windows XP installed on it for a respectable price so I grabbed it and then went on my way.

It arrived two days earlier than I had planned for, so I've already got it up and running.

Before installing anything I talked to a bunch of people and did some reading about using X64 so I could get extra memory into the machine. The machine supports it so I decided to go that route.

For those of you, like me, who have never done 64 bit before, the way it works is this. It's not the computer that is 64 bit, it's the O/S, but the processor needs to support x64. Then you can install a 64 bit operating system on it which will take advantage of the processor. A lot of applications (such as Visual Studio!) area able to take advantage of this. Visual Studio has a "WoW" version. I didn't know what that meant and thought that it was just a 64 bit version, but Bill McCarthy (who tries to keep me honest, though I know I provide a big challenge for him) enlightened me that it's not 64 bit. I found this explanation of WoW in "How Does X64 Measure Up?" in an old Visual Studio Mag article.

"X64 runs a special Windows on Windows (WOW) session that lets 32-bit applications run inside the 64-bit operating system. WOW sessions provide better performance than even native 32-bit systems. Why is that? Because of the limitations that X64 finally breaks"

The big lure of 64 bit is that it is able to access more than 4 GB RAM. Actually with a 32bit box, you'll never even see a full 4 GB, it will be more like 3 to 3.5.

Here's what I did to get this going.

I have an MSDN subscription so it wasn't a problem for me to install the 64 bit version of Vista Ultimate.

Then I needed to download the 64 bit driver for my video card from nVidia. The funny thing is that now I have beautiful Aero capability on my system but am still (for now) RDPing into it from an XP box, so I don't see Aero anyway.

I installed Vista SP1, then VS2008 64WOW (Wow!), then VS2008 SP1. Oh how nice it was not to have to deal with removing all of the gunk from betas and alphas etc.

Then I downloaded SQL Server 2008 and got that installed. I have actually never even looked at this version yet. Never bothered with the betas or anything. But this is a brand new box and it's going to have only the latest and greatest on it.

The next step was to test Visual Studio and of course I don't do much without data, so I downloaded the 2008 version of the AdventureWorksLT database from CodePlex and installed that. Then opened up VS, made sure I could connect to the db from the server explorer and created a little test console app with an Entity Data Model in it. Works great. What more do I need? :-)

I have a lot of tools that I'll eventually need to get onto this box. I've already made sure Reflector is on there (did you know that Red Gate just bought Reflector?), Fiddler and XML Notepad but I have a long way to go with getting all of my tools on there. I think I will just do that on an as needed basis so that I can get back to work.

One other thing that is going to have to happen is that I'll need to port some of my apps that are still in VS2005 up to VS2008 (I'll stick to .NET 2.0 framework for those apps though). Many of these apps use 3rd party tools from Infragistics, Telerik, Janus and more. Yesterday I ported the app that uses some Telerik windows controls and very coincidentally, only a day before they had put a beta of the version that works with VS2008 SP1 on their site, so I grabbed that.

I've been happily working away on my laptop this past week with my drive plugged in externally, but now I'll need to take the drive and put it into the new computer.

The whole purpose behind having a 64bit machine is so that you can break the 4GB memory barrier. This computer came with 2 GB already in it and I'm still waiting for the additional memory which I ordered from Crucial to arrive. But in the mean time, the performance even with 2GB is great. My overall Windows Experience Index is 3.5 but that's from the not-optimal graphics card. The processor and other ratings are impressive already and will only get better when I put the additional memory in.