Making Connections

November 1, 2004

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Windows XP 64-bit edition for AMD Processors

We've been testing out the 64-bit preview edition of Windows for AMD Athlon64 and Opteron systems on Silver, an AMD Athlon64 system with a single 3000+ CPU (AMD doesn't use actual clock-cycle numbers) and a GB of Kingston memory. The short version: This is still a beta, but a promising one.

The first sign that this was still a beta came when we tried to visit the Windows Update site. Using the Internet Explorer icon, then clicking on the Windows Update icon, as we've done hundreds of times before, told us that we had to log in as Administrator to run Windows Update. No matter how many times we yelled that we WERE logged in as Administrator, Silver didn't listen. After more shouting, Alex saw there was a second Internet Explorer icon, "Internet Explorer (32-bit)." That version of IE at least loaded the Windows Update site, but gave singularly unenlightening messages about how the Windows Update engine wouldn't run. Foo.

We finally tracked down the answer in the Microsoft private newsgroup for the x86 64-bit preview edition. The x86-64 preview edition isn't actually supported by Windows Update yet, but Windows Update doesn't actually know the difference between "regular" IA32 Windows XP and x86-64 Windows, so it gets confused. Besides, there were no updates of this version of Windows, yet.

The Office Update site (officeupdate.microsoft.com) behaves better than Windows Update, scanning for updates and letting you download them. One problem: the Office 2000 Service Release 1A application doesn't display the icon next to the "update your version of Office" choice, at least not until you click on the (invisible) icon. Then, the Office updater does run in the usual fashion, downloading, installing and updating. The Service Release 3 update (which must be installed after SR-1A and a reboot) behaves better, probably because it uses a newer version of the Windows installer.

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