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Simply not worth the trouble!
I recently got a brand new computer that came with Windows Vista. It was working fine except it seems to be awfully slow running cygwin. My trouble got a lot worse than I thought the 64-bit Vista might resolve the problem for me.
The first trouble was that the new computer has relatively small storage space, when I tried to install 64-bit Vista; it happily went for about an hour and then stopped in the middle. I talked to a couple of colleagues and figured we have to wipe the existing content and do a clean install. Now, a clean install means I need to locate various custom drivers for the machine. This took a few more hours. That was the first day of my journey into abyss.
After Vista 64 was installed, I immediately started to notice a lot of errors in the Event Viewer, for example, both DNS Cache and Cryptographic Service kept on dying for no apparent reason. I naturally started hunting for information around the internet to see how to fix these problems. There isn’t much helpful information out there, plus since my network connection isn't working, I have to use another computer to do the searching. This pretty much consumed the second day and I was not sure exactly what the problems were or how to solve them.
The next day was a Saturday; I thought I would have more time to sort the thing out. Maybe I did not do the right thing in the installation of the OS, so I started the whole process again. By now, I have all the necessary drivers handy, so the installation took only a couple of hours. Plus, I was at home, so there are more things to do than to just stare at the progress bars. The network was still iffy after installing the latest drivers, but I decided to ignore it and see what happens to the performance of cygwin. The trouble is that with an iffy network, downloading cygwin packages takes forever and I have to leave it running overnight. That pretty much ruined by my Saturday.
I got up early on Sunday to see how things went and was pleasantly surprised that cygwin actually finished installing. I copied over my old start up files for my cygwin account and tried to start a shell. Well, my favorite shell does not like parentheses in the environment variables. Luckily, the default bash works fine. I ended up spending a few hours Sunday night trying to customize my startup files for bash before I finally got a chance to run the benchmark that got me started at the first place. Well, using 64-bit Vista did not help at all -- in fact it is slightly slower using 64-bit Vista 64 than using 32-bit Vista!
I could bear the fact that my four-day's of working on installing 64-bit Vista not only did not improve my situation but made it worse. In desperation, I went through the whole process one more time; the results were the same, broken network and slow cygwin. By this time, I have become efficient at the various steps -- the last round of reintall only took a day;-) After a week of madness, I eventually restored the system to the OS that came from the manufacture. So, I went a full circle gaining exactly nothing.
The moral of this story -- don't do it. Switching from 32-bit Vista to 64-bit Vista only if you have concrete evidence it would help, otherwise save money and save headache by staying with what you've got.
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© John Wu
The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author.
The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by the University of Minnesota.
