Operating System
64-bit Operating Systems
Microsoft Windows XP x64 Professional
Windows XP Professional x64 Edition is designed to meet the demands of professionals who require large amounts of memory and floating point performance in areas such as mechanical design and analysis, 3-D animation, video editing and composition, and scientific and high-performance computing applications. FREE TRIAL (120-days).
The Gentoo Linux operating system is a Linux distribution designed to be modular, portable, easy to maintain, flexible, and optimized for the user’s machine. This is accomplished by building all tools and utilities from source code, although, for convenience, several large software packages are also available as precompiled binaries for various architectures. Gentoo achieves this via the Portage system.
Ubuntu is a Linux distribution offering an operating system predominantly targeted at personal computers. Based on Debian GNU/Linux, Ubuntu concentrates on usability, freedom from restriction of use, regular releases, and ease of installation.
Fedora Core is an RPM-based Linux distribution, developed by the community-supported Fedora Project and sponsored by Red Hat. Fedora aims to be a complete, general-purpose operating system containing only free and open source software.
Microsoft Windows Vista RC2 64-bit
Windows Vista has hundreds of new features, some of the most significant of which include an updated graphical user interface and visual style dubbed Windows Aero, improved searching features, new multimedia creation tools such as Windows DVD Maker, and completely redesigned networking, audio, print, and display sub-systems.
Kubuntu Linux comes in a Live CD which can also be installed onto the hard disk to provide better performance. Kubuntu is based on Ubuntu, but is built on KDE. Those of you who are used to the Windows XP look may want to consider using this.
SUSE includes an installation and administration program called YaST2 which handles hard disk partitioning, system setup, RPM package management, online updates, network and firewall configuration, user administration and more in an integrated interface. SUSE has support for resizing NTFS partitions during installation which allows it to co-exist with existing Windows 2000 or XP installations. SUSE has the ability to detect and install drivers for many common winmodems shipped with OEM desktop and laptop systems.
FreeBSD® is an advanced operating system for x86 compatible (including Pentium® and Athlon™), amd64 compatible (including Opteron™, Athlon™64, and EM64T), UltraSPARC®, IA-64, PC-98 and ARM architectures. It is derived from BSD, the version of UNIX® developed at the University of California, Berkeley.
Mac OS X
Mac OS X Tiger delivers the power of 64-bit computing to your Mac. Build and run a new generation of 64-bit applications that address massive amounts of memory, without compromising the performance of your existing 32-bit applications.
