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robh

64 bit operating systems and Rockwell software

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Is anybody using Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. Or any other 64 bit operating systems? Rockwell told me today via live chat that Rockwell software products have not been qualified to work with a 64 bit OS. Some software may work marginally, but 64 bit OS is not supported at this time. The real zinger here is that I have 4 new Dell D830 notebooks on the way and they all have Windows XP Professional x64 Edition.

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Oh gosh - it took them a year and a half to support Vista. Rockwell tends to be far from the cutting edge in terms of new platform support. In my experience XP x64 is significantly "more different" a beast - remember how long it took them to support (port) spell checking in Outlook? While this is especially true of hardware support, it also applies to application compilation. I'd install the software and give it a whirl, but don't spend to much time "troubleshooting" applications that crash/don't run. Perhaps a virtualized approach on those laptops is your solution...? Edited by Nathan

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I called Dell to confirm that the OS (both Vista and XP) were actually 64-bit versions of the software. Thankfully, they informed me that the units shipped with the 32-bit version of the OS software. So it looks like all I will have to do is downgrade to SP2. Feel better for now.

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We have not tried XP64, but we by standard wipe all new laptops and format with the IT group's WinXP-Pro. Bundled laptops often have a lot of service crap on them that just create potential security open doors, slow down PC performance and make startups longer. Here is a tip...if you are setting up multiple laptops of the same hardware and software, get one system setup and configured (all the RSLogix software, all the RSLinx drivers, etc.), make a ghost of its hard drive, then duplicate this image for the other machines. I figure 50-60 hours setup time per laptop to get all of the programming packages setup and configured properly. In your case, 50 hours for laptop 1, then another 1 hour each to Ghost the drive images. Badda-bing!

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Good advice. Also, look at running sysprep to take care of unique identifiers that you don't want ghosted. In particular don't join the computer to the domain prior to imaging. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb457067.aspx The other cool option is to create fully configured virtual machines. They're even simpler to move and run.

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Thanks for the tips!

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It may not matter, but once we get Vista support from Rockwell it should work on the 64-bit version fine. Vista's 32-bit emulation is on a completely different level than XP-64's.

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Where's this coming from? Curious, not skeptical.

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Whoops, looks like my memory was foggy. The article I thought I got that from was talking about drivers for 64-bit versions of Vista. Anyway, the 32-bit emulation stuff is called WOW64. Wikipedia has an article here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WOW64

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Thanks for that. Interesting stuff - looks like the old NTVDM on crack!

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