Well, last night I finally tried putting a 64 bit operating system on my laptop as an experiment.<\/p>\n
I shrank the Windows partition by a further 5GB, put a new partition on it and installed the MandrakeLinux 10.0 RC1 AMD64 distribution on it.<\/p>\n
So far, other than the 2.6 kernel which is used during the install process not being able to access the keyboard I’ve not had any problems. Of course, it can’t use the wireless ethernet as ndiswrapper only works as a 32bit driver. I built a newer Linus kernel (2.6.7) and installed that as x86-64 support is getting (generally) better with each release. I didn’t put 2.6.8{,.1} on there as that seems to be a rather buggy release.<\/p>\n
The machine does feel substantially quicker than when it was running in 32bit mode. I think the kernel build was almost double the speed, though this is only a feeling as I didn’t time it. However, after the kernel build using the original kernel I did notice that the system started bogging down and becoming a little unresponsive but I’ve not seen this (yet) with the newer kernel.<\/p>\n
Anyway, it looks promising.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Well, last night I finally tried putting a 64 bit operating system on my laptop as an experiment. I shrank the Windows partition by a further 5GB, put a new partition on it and installed the MandrakeLinux 10.0 RC1 AMD64 … Continue reading