Hi Everyone,

I am trying to find out if anyone has had any issues with Access
applications / Jet databases on 64bit Windows platforms. I am looking
at doing a hardware upgrade and wanted to 'use' the 'power' of the
newer processors which all seem to be 64bit these days.

Is anyone working with a 64bit setup?

Cheers

The Frog

I've no problem using Access/JET databases on Windows 7 64-bit.
Tested versions 2000, 2003, and 2007.

I am looking forward to
placing some new hardware on my desk. 64bit, Win 7, loads of RAM
and an SSD.

I am thinking along the exact same lines with the SSD's. I have
located the two drives that I want to use in my system (desktop),
one is an SSD from OCZ called the Z-Drive which connects directly
to a PCIe slot and uses a dedicated hardware RAID controller
(Highpoint I think) to control four banks of chips for sustained
700mb/s read AND write! Pretty sweet :-)

The other is an actual hardware RAM drive with flash backup. The
RAM drive may prove unnecessary with the Z-Drive's speed since the
direct connect through the PCIe is significantly faster than
through any current SATA port. The RAM drive is from ACARD (9010 /
9010B).

What do you think?

(best if it's partitioned into
two separate volumes, system and apps)

and then you can have a normal hard drive for data storage.

One of the difficult things about Windows is that it insists on
putting the user profiles on the same volume as the OS, unless you
have a server and/or roaming profiles, or unless you jump through
the necessary hoops to transfer it it to a different volume. I did
the latter on my Win2000 desktop years ago so that my user profiles
(which I consider DATA) were on my data partition, but I recall it
being quite a bit of work to get it working properly.

The user profiles can be a real pain to handle, even with backups. One
of the things that I did to minimise the pain was to simply partition
my HD (win xp machine) and right click 'My Documents' and set it to a
new location -

"David W. Fenton" <XXXusenet at (no spam) dfenton.com.invalid> wrote:

(best if it's partitioned into
two separate volumes, system and apps)

Why?

and then you can have a normal hard drive for data storage.

Why? My thinking on this one is that my data files only take 4 Gb
or so. Whereas my Win XP and Program Files is 50 Gb. So if it's
faster why wouldn't I put my files on the SSD?

One of the difficult things about Windows is that it insists on
putting the user profiles on the same volume as the OS, unless you
have a server and/or roaming profiles, or unless you jump through
the necessary hoops to transfer it it to a different volume. I did
the latter on my Win2000 desktop years ago so that my user
profiles (which I consider DATA) were on my data partition, but I
recall it being quite a bit of work to get it working properly.

What is in a Windows user profile anyhow? I've never quite
bothered to research all that. I recall the IT department at a
client telling someone that their profile got corrupted so the IT
guy deleted it. The IT guy added but it won't make any difference
to you.

I was thinking to use two of these SSD's for my system. One for
the OS and programs, and the other for running a more heavy duty
DB like Postgres (somewhere to store all that data....).

The user profiles can be a real pain to handle, even with backups.
One of the things that I did to minimise the pain was to simply
partition my HD (win xp machine) and right click 'My Documents'
and set it to a new location - which was the separate partition on
the HD.

I also ran
from the Start->Run menu option: 'control userpasswords2'. I was
logged in as myself and the computer is not shared so I unchecked
the 'must use username / password' checkbox and the system now
just logs me in directly as myself.

Last step was to use a tool called ODIN (you
can find it on SourceForge) to make an image of the windows
partition that can be restored pretty much instantly if something
goes wrong.

With a BartPE boot disk / USB Key and ODIN with the image it made
I can completely restore my win xp box in about 3 minutes. Thats
about as slick as I got with the profiles side of things.

I also have 2Gig of RAM, which far exceeds any use I have on the
system, so I turned the windows paging file off completely! The
system now boots in just over 30 seconds.

My memory usage is hovering at
about 1 to 1.2 Gig with everything running and the system works
fine - or at least I havent come across any issues yet.

I figured that if you
have the RAM why would you need virtual memory? So I turned it off
Works like a charm.

It would be very handy to have a simple method to dump your
profile - without all the documents and extra stuff - to a single
file that you could use to backup / restore with. Backup profile,
backup data, backup OS, and thats it. Maybe I will put some energy
into this once I get my new toy.

I don't have any important files in My Documents. All my files
have been in a separate folder, called "1 data" or a separate
partition Q: since DOS days. ("1 data" so it appears first on the
Windows Explorer list for convenience.) As far as I can tell
there is nothing important in my profile.

(best if it's partitioned into
two separate volumes, system and apps)

Why?

Because you want OS functions separate from apps.

In the UNIX world,that's pretty much SOP.

and then you can have a normal hard drive for data storage.

Why? My thinking on this one is that my data files only take 4 Gb
or so. Whereas my Win XP and Program Files is 50 Gb. So if it's
faster why wouldn't I put my files on the SSD?

I said to put them on the SSD, just in a partition separate from the
OS partition.

What is in a Windows user profile anyhow? I've never quite
bothered to research all that. I recall the IT department at a
client telling someone that their profile got corrupted so the IT
guy deleted it. The IT guy added but it won't make any difference
to you.

It's the information stored on a PC that is specific to your user
logon.

"David W. Fenton" <XXXusenet at (no spam) dfenton.com.invalid> wrote:

(best if it's partitioned into
two separate volumes, system and apps)

Why?

Because you want OS functions separate from apps.

But why? Why not leave Program Files on C drive?

In the UNIX world,that's pretty much SOP.

Irrelevant.

What is in a Windows user profile anyhow? I've never quite
bothered to research all that. I recall the IT department at a
client telling someone that their profile got corrupted so the
IT guy deleted it. The IT guy added but it won't make any
difference to you.

It's the information stored on a PC that is specific to your user
logon.

Like what though besides the contents of C:\Documents and
Settings\ttoews\ ... Or is that it? Your prioflle is all your
files in that folder?

Back to topic: I wasnt aware of the Page Faults issue. I will look
into this. I can tolerate a certain amount of course since RAM is
many times faster than a HD, but it will still be interesting to
know.

So
far the system runs many times faster without the paging file. I
have heard that a RAM Disk is also a great way to do a paging file
for speed,

but that seems to make no sense when you are using the very
memory for a paging file that you are supposed to keep free so you
dont need a paging file! Hence my conumdrum so I just turned it
off and made sure that I had more than enough RAM for my needs.

As for the password / login situation, it is always possible to
use Whole Disk Encryption products or even just a password
protected bootloader (GAG from SourceForge for example).

I dont have anything
that interesting on my machine to warrant extreme measures of
protection,

and anything that I want to keep private I put into a
TrueCrypt encrypted container or partition.

Its not that I have
anything in my holiday or wedding photos that I think is worthy of
'secret' status, I just dont want people copying / editing /
distributing them. They are private and they stay that way. I am
happy to show them to people but not give them to people. I keep
my tax returns there too

I find it interesting to see different peoples takes on this
topic. It does tend to be very personal doesnt it?

PC's are very much an
extension of the person who uses them. We express ourselves in our
PC's by adaptig them to our behaviour and desires. I like mine
quick and simple, keep the data separate, the OS quickly
re-buildable, and my personal things 'private' and safe (I will
simply not trust Windows Security up to and including Windows
Vista and all the predecessors

they are all broken.

I cant speak to Win 7 yet, havent got the new
system, but soon.......). I would never build corporate
infrastructure the same way - I am a total security driven
individual in that context, and that is a very different approach.