Frustrated Touchscree IQ506 owner

[jeannie]

I recently purchased this new pc, and I am having extreme difficulty. I am trying to use this pc in my music studio, and the 64bit operating system is not compatable with any of the 1000's of dollars worth of software and equipment that I have. I purchased the pc through a home shopping network, and it was not advertised anywhere that it was a 64bit operating system. By the time I had it all set up and figured out what was wrong, the 30 day return policy was over. HP support will not help because I need to downgrade to 32 bit. Does anyone have any driver advice for this system? Especially the video.

[JimT]

Hi Jeannie,

What might be worth doing is to go back to the application vendors and see if they have any updates to your equipment like firmware, and update to these applications you paid big $$$ for to run under vista x64.

I "had" and issue with my M-Audio Firewire 410, wasn't being recognized by Vista 64bit, I joined the m-audio community and as many others were also having the same issue and making huge waves of noises to the developers, m-audio then made it a priority to release vista 64bit drivers,...  Now i can use my iq508 with m-audio device, but now the software I use to record my guitar playing tracks is still not supported ...

To me it seems many application developers are not getting serious with vista 64 yet, maybe the fact that windows 7 is on the drawing board could be a factoring account for this...  I just hope that if and when W7 does come out, that W7 will be supported to install and run not long there after on iq500 platform...

[mmdm]

A lot of the speciality programs will have 64 bit versions of the software, but some do not.  There isnt any way to install a 32 bit OS on 64 bit hardware.  The only other option is toinstall Microsoft virtual PC 2007 and buy a licnesed copy of either vista 32 bit or XP 32 bit and install within the virtual world.  I have XP running just fine on top of vista 64, but the only program I have running is a video editor, which seems to work fine in the virtual install.

[Mthree]

Which of your software packages are incompatible with 64-bit? 

The challenge often resides with the software developer, and many have provided updates to their 32-bit versions to meet the needs of the growing popularity of 64-bit systems. I found that many of the packages I use at home on my 4GB Touchsmart IQ506 were already compatible (MS Office 2007), some already included 64-bit installers (PaperPort) and only a couple required free updates from the software company. Two required a paid upgrades, and in one case, I was able to obtain discounted / free updates as I escalated my case in their support queue.