Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room
Should I swtich from w7 32 bit to w7 64 bit?
daddydave:
I always forget about chipset drivers too, I had forgotten this, but when I bought my motherboard, I did actually seek out one that the manufacturer claimed was compatible with Windows 7 64-bit.
I also assume that if off-the-shelf computers actually work with an operating system it didn't ship with, it's merely coincidental. I don't picture HP saying "Oh, no, the user can't upgrade the computer, he'll have to buy one of our newer computers!" And if you're shipping a computer with 32 bit Windows, there actually is not much point in making it upgradable beyond 4 GB of memory. I see some off the shelf computers are shipping with 64 bit these days, I haven't checked their memory upgradability.
If you don't want to see more than 3GB of memory in the OS, I see very little point in going 64 bit. But I am repeating myself.
Musubi:
Well right now I'm using about 80% of my RAM all the time, and I've got more than 3gb already... so yeah I would like to upgrade:)
Software that I can't live without:
Find and run robot
Copernic summarizer
www.copernic.com (check the trial)
Copernic agent
www.copernic.com
You can actually get it for free (from the creator) here
http://www.copernic.com/en/products/desktop-search/bundle/bundle-agent.html
I don't use desktop search though since windows search is now so well implemented
Anki
http://ichi2.net/anki/
Bs Player
http://www.bsplayer.org/
Gomplayer
http://www.gomlab.com/eng/
An archiver preferably powerarchiver but winrar and winzip are okay to, even stuffit is okay.
Doublekiller
http://www.bigbangenterprises.com/en/doublekiller/
Scanitto (actually blindscan because I use a scanner from a different computer in my network:), but it comes bundled with it)
http://www.masterslabs.com/en/scanitto.html
Blindscanner
http://www.masterslabs.com/en/blindscanner.html
Total Uninstall
http://www.martau.com/
Microsoft word:)
Opera
Firefox (or to be more precise Pale moon) www.palemoon.org
Nuance omnipage or Finereader or any other good ocr software because I need it for work.
http://www.foobar2000.org/
Editpad or ultraedit or something like that
http://www.editpadpro.com/editpadlite.html
ESET smart security 4
http://www.eset.com/
Chameleon startup manager
http://www.chameleon-managers.com/windows-startup-manager/
evernote
www.evernote.com
Miranda
http://www.miranda-im.org/
Flux
http://www.stereopsis.com/flux/
Firebird 2.0
Actually its not firebird but a software that I need for work, it's required for the job I'm doing now.
You can just check if it will run and startup.
http://www.norcom.com.pl/download/nfz/Instaluj_GlobalZPO_Demo_1_6_7_0_z_Danymi.exe
It's for creating documents for the polish public health care fund
The licence for it was pretty expensive and I would be sad loosing it.
Minilyrics
http://www.crintsoft.com/
Point motivator, ProcessTammer, instant boss,
www.donationcoder.com
A VNC client, any one will do.
xyplorer or something like that
http://www.xyplorer.com/
Proto
http://miechu.pl/proto/
Everything
http://www.voidtools.com/
comicrack
http://comicrack.cyolito.com/
Oh yeah and nero and website watcher, ad muncher, direct folders and sandboxie
I also wanted to try some other desktop search software, Archivarius and dtsearch.
And I also like to try out all the newest software, but I don't think this will really be a problem.
Tekzel:
I've done exactly the same thing, moved from Win7 32bit to Win7 64bit for one reason only - MS' arbitrary decision to not allow full use of the installed 4GB under 32bit.
-4wd (April 04, 2010, 08:11 AM)
--- End quote ---
Nothing arbitrary about it, and it wasn't Microsoft's decision. 4GB is the maximum address space possible with a 32bit system. Your memory takes up that address space starting from the bottom, and all the devices that have memory mapped ROM or RAM takes it up starting from the top. For instance, the memory on your video card, the ROM on your motherboard, hard drives, etc. At some point they overlap, and that varies from system to system, depending upon the hardware. Once they overlap that ends the top of your accessible RAM.
Personally, I have been running 64bit since the beta of Windows 7 with little problem. The only programs I have run into that wouldn't work for me are ones that lack signed kernel mode drivers. Its not that common, but it happens. You can bypass that requirement at every boot, but you can't turn it off. Which doesn't make me happy, but I deal. Microsoft should have left those of us that wish a way to turn off the requirement. It stinks of big brotherism, and damn it I want to run my PC the way I want to run it, not the way they want me to.
f0dder:
Tekzel, while you can only address 4GB on a 32bit system, we've had PAE since the ppro, allowing the use of 64GB on a 32bit system. Yeah, an app can only see 4GB, but those 4GB can be mapped to any part of the physical memory space... which brings us back to the "devices eating up memory" - this is easily solvable by remapping memory, but MS doesn't support that on 32bit client versions of Windows. Pre-SP1, XP actually did support it (but still - arbitrarily - limited itself to support only 4GB of physical memory). With SP1, the system was changed to support only the lower 4GB of physical memory address space, because of fscktarded driver developers thinking "I'm writing a 32bit driver, I only need to look at the lower 32bit of the PHYSICAL_ADDRESSes".
4wd:
I've done exactly the same thing, moved from Win7 32bit to Win7 64bit for one reason only - MS' arbitrary decision to not allow full use of the installed 4GB under 32bit.
-4wd (April 04, 2010, 08:11 AM)
--- End quote ---
Nothing arbitrary about it, and it wasn't Microsoft's decision. 4GB is the maximum address space possible with a 32bit system. Your memory takes up that address space starting from the bottom, and all the devices that have memory mapped ROM or RAM takes it up starting from the top. For instance, the memory on your video card, the ROM on your motherboard, hard drives, etc. At some point they overlap, and that varies from system to system, depending upon the hardware. Once they overlap that ends the top of your accessible RAM.-Tekzel (April 18, 2010, 08:57 AM)
--- End quote ---
If we were talking purely about hardware then I would agree with you...but we're not.
We're talking about the Windows OS.
This topic has been done to death previously here and here - the decision to not support the full 4GB by a 32bit OS is purely an arbitrary one. The 32bit server editions of 2000/2003/2008 all support the use of more than 4GB of physical RAM and as f0dder has mentioned, XP SP0 supported the full 4GB.
EDIT: Dang it! f0dder's done it again! Dear f0dder, could you please set your timezone 1 hour behind mine so I have a chance of sneaking in a reply before you do?
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