restoring to different architecture with WAL

hi,
I have a postgres 8.4 on a Ubuntu box at my workplace, and I plan to
implement continuous backup with the WAL technique. This backup is mainly
used to provide the usual backup for the company, but I would also like to
use it as an almost always up-to-date copy for my personal computer, mainly
for development purposes. Thus, no two-way synchronization required.
I could (actually I am) use pg_dump to get the full copy each time, but
since the database is very big and the vpn is slowish, it would be
significantly less pain to download only the changes in the WAL files.
I already created the base backup with pg_start_backup and transferred to
my computer, which is currently running Windows. The problem is that I
can't even start up the base cluster, because postgres throws the following
exception. Is there any way to circumvent this problem or should I stick to
the pg_dump-pg_restore method?
Thanks,
Balazs

c:\Program Files (x86)\PostgreSQL\8.4\bin>pg_ctl start -D
d://documents//munka//postgres_data
server starting

c:\Program Files (x86)\PostgreSQL\8.4\bin>2013-03-07 22:11:16 CET FATAL:
database files are incompatible with server
2013-03-07 22:11:16 CET DETAIL: The database cluster was initialized with
USE_FLOAT8_BYVAL but the server was compiled without USE_FLOAT8_BYVAL.
2013-03-07 22:11:16 CET HINT: It looks like you need to recompile or
initdb.