Bill,
I only found a 13 month old post about PM & 64 bit Vista. Has PM been tested under 64 bit Vista. Does it work? is it better or worse?
We have not tested with any 64-bit OSes. PM will not automatically take advantage of a larger address space, though it would likely work fine on a 64-bit version of Windows Vista.
When will PM be tested and certified for 64 bit Vista? Adobe is quickly making the transition and I am about to build a 64 bit computer. The 2-3gb memory limit on 32 bit XP is killing us given the huge load placed on hardware by current photo apps. I would think this transition is crucial for PM since many/most folks will switch to a 64 bit O/S to get better performance when they buy new computers.
I don't know. If by certified for 64-bit Vista you mean by some third-party lab or by Microsoft, then likely never. If by certified you mean that we will perform our own testing and give it our blessing, then I suppose we could do that with the 4.6 version.
But just using a 64-bit OS and having much more RAM should help the current version of Photo Mechanic quite a bit. PM would now theoretically have access to a full 32-bit address space (4GB of RAM all to itself) and should work really well. You should be able to increase PM's Memory Cache to 1-1.5GB which should be really nice for performance. Photo Mechanic doesn't do the sort of operations that Photoshop does so it wouldn't benefit as much as Photoshop would.
By all means build a 64-bit computer and install a 64-bit Windows OS on it. Legacy 32-bit apps are supposed to run just fine on both XP and Vista 64-bit OSes.
-Kirk