Peter GalliWhen Microsoft announced that it was ready to roll out Windows Live OneCare version 1.5 to coincide with the general release of Windows Vista, it omitted one important fact: the product will not support Vista x64 or XP x64. I received an email this morning from a reader telling me that the OneCare v1.5 beta would not install on his Vista test machine as it was just for 32-bit systems. "It would be nice, now that 64-bit Vista is set to go, to specify if the software will run properly in 64-bit," he said. "Has this changed in the final release? It would be nice to know as I have OneCare on all three home PCs, and plan on upgrading all of them to 64-bit Vista," he said.
So I asked Microsoft, which confirmed that, indeed, OneCare v1.5 would not run on Vista x64 or Windows XP x64 for that matter, "although it will support 32-bit Windows on x64 hardware," a Microsoft spokesperson told me. The spokesperson was also pretty non-committal about the possibility of x64 support going forward, saying "we continually evolve OneCare to meet customer demand, though we have no further specifics to share at this time around potential support for x64 in the future." My colleague Joe Wilcox spoke to Gina Narkunas, the lead product manager for Windows Live OneCare, this evening from London. She told him that "it wasn"t a business priority to support 64-bit," because there is "no consumer demand" for a 64-bit right now.