Over the weekend I finally got around to installing the 64bit version of Vista on my home desktop. It was something that was on my backlog for quite sometime. For one thing I get the ability to access memory over ~3.5 gigabits of RAM. Also the other key driver is that Adobe Lightroom 2.0 support 64 bit, so it can access more of that RAM while processing photographs. I understand that the same underlying architecture is part of Photoshop CS4 now, but for know I am still running CS3, so I won’t be able to take advantage of that yet.
One issue that I ran into when installing the 64 bit version of Lightroom on my machine was that every time I launched the program it asked me for the license key. I was not able to fid this specific issue on the Adobe support site, but I figured out that if you launch Lightroom, once, with Administrator privileges, put in your license key all works from that point forward. And does not require you to open Lightroom as admin in the future. I am guessing there is some registry key that is inaccessible as a normal user. This definitely is a bug, hopefully Adobe can provided a fix in the future, but for know it is a pretty easy work around.
Not sure why the 64-bit version would be any different, although Windows does use a special Wow6432Node registry hive for certain things (mainly mapping 32-bit apps to the “Program Files (x86)” folder). But is it really a bug to ship a product that requires elevated privileges to run correctly? Like Visual Studio? UAC sucks anyway – turn it off..
OK Mike, I think I deserve that one