Thursday, January 22, 2009

When the Latest and Greatest isn't the Greatest

I thought my Windows 2000 computer was starting to show it's age. 512M of RAM and a 200G hard drive just doesn't go as far as it used to. I setup a Vista laptop a few months ago and it's working pretty good, so figured I'd take the plunge and get 6GB of RAM and get Vista x64 to take full advantage of it. Everything was going fine (with the normal Vista quirks, of course) until I tried to install the Cisco VPN client. Seems as though there is no support for Vista64 and my particular VPN software.

Dandy.

I found NCO Secure Entry Client and will try to set it up, but we'll see...

6 comments:

Noons said...

Yeah, been away from the x64 versions for the time being as well here:
works well for servers but for home desktops it breaks just about every single driver, utility and special purpose piece of software I've got...

Gareth said...

Hi Jeff,

Many people in the same situation including me, and no update when I checked for my new laptop last November. I'm running a guest under VMWare Server (also unsupported on Vista) for Cisco VPN reason ... and a bunch of others. Keen to hear if you find a solution for Vista 64.
Other than that Vista 64 cranks along nicely after tweaking it back pretty much to XP ;-)

Regards,
Gareth

Alex Gorbachev said...

All VPN software I use works on mac even better than on windows.:)
From the times I tried to switch to Linux, I recall that some VPN (well pretty much all I think) required hours and hours of tweaking.

Bradd Piontek said...

I experienced the same issue a few months ago with my 'new' x64 Vista desktop. Cisco has no plans of supporting Vista x64 with the VPN client. They do support it on a newer Cisco product, but from my research, that requires a hardware update on the host side.

I'd have to disagree with Alex on setting up VPN on Linux. It took me all of 10 minutes to install and configure VPNC under Ubuntu (running in a virtualbox VM). I tried configuring that NCO on Vista and had some success with certain VPN targets but not so much with the one I needed.

I have yet to experience any issues with drivers and utilities aside from the VPN issue.

Anonymous said...

Running on 32 bit vista ultimate and cisco vpn software is working for me.

Too much compatibility problems with various things to try the 64 bit route with vista.

Anonymous said...

If Alex believed it, he would have bought a couple of mac laptops rather than Dell's running Vista 32 bit.
It is shame but 64bit is less supported on Windows then many linux distros (in terms of drivers)

I have been running XP for years, I have zero intention to move to Vista.

On my test box I use Ubuntu 64bit as the host and run VMs on top of it. Linux remains a pain in butt though, wireless drivers, in the end I hacked a $80 D-link wireless router into a $250 router by updating the firmware, now I have a 2nd network connected only to the main modem via wireless.

Have Fun