32 bit or 64 bit (win7)?

Admiral Huddy said:
any reason for not going 64bit?
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I think this has to be the argument from now on. Is there a reason NOT to have a x64 OS?

paradigm said:
No, no, no, no, no. This thread is full of fail.

If you have 64-bit, install 64-bit, even if you only have 2GB of RAM. At the end of the day it will run at the same speed, you can run both 32-bit and 64-bit apps, and if you ever upgrade to 4GB+ of RAM, then you don't need to re-install.

32-bit is dead.
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Ditto. If one has a x64 chip, then I pity the foo who doesn't get x64. It just doesn't make any sense any more.

That and anyone who insists on running x86 OS these days are actually holding up the development of the human race! :D
 
I think there are still issues with certain mobile broadband dongles under x64 Win7. Besides that, I've not come across any other compatibility issues.
 
Despite what some people say, many 32 bit operating systems support well in excess of ~3.5 GB of RAM, via PAE (around 64GB actually), however this still meant individual applications could address only 2GB of memory (very few actually use more than that even now), the 3.5GB limit is effectively artificial because they wanted to limit PAE [in windows] to server operating systems for obvious marketing reasons.

Anyway, that said the advantages of having the potential for individual applications being able to use [address] in excess of 2GB of RAM and other useful features which are of interest to programmers such as 64bit integers, extra registers etc, mean it is worth moving over.

Bit of an aside, but just thought it'd be interesting to let people know that many 32 bit operating systems are actually capable of addressing over 3.5GB of RAM.
 
dustofnations said:
Bit of an aside, but just thought it'd be interesting to let people know that many 32 bit operating systems are actually capable of addressing over 3.5GB of RAM.
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I think a fair amount of us know/knew that. It's just that x86 isn't future proof. Why bother with x86 and then buy/install x64 later?
 
MarcLister said:
I think a fair amount of us know/knew that. It's just that x86 isn't future proof. Why bother with x86 and then buy/install x64 later?
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I wasn't suggesting it would be a wise thing to do (as I stated explicitly in the post), just informing people as a matter of interest that 32 bit windows systems could have supported in excess of ~3.5GB of RAM if Microsoft had the desire.:)
 
I use to have vista 32 bit with 2 gig memory and wish i,d gone 64 bit ages ago got 4 gig and windows 7 runs like a dream waste of time going 32 bit now 64 bit is the future
 
dustofnations said:
Despite what some people say, many 32 bit operating systems support well in excess of ~3.5 GB of RAM, via PAE (around 64GB actually), however this still meant individual applications could address only 2GB of memory (very few actually use more than that even now), the 3.5GB limit is effectively artificial because they wanted to limit PAE [in windows] to server operating systems for obvious marketing reasons.
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Marketing reasons? Why would they care? Your windows license allows you to use either 32 or 64-bit Windows, and they don't get any more money either way. I've never seen any MS advertising around the 64/32 argument - I think it would go over the heads of most of the general public.

PAE was enabled circa Windows 2000 and gave a large amount of unforseen problems with drivers that weren't expecting addresses that large, truncated them, and then promptly brought the whole system crashing down. Instead of persuing it, which was probably a waste of time as not many home users would have been using more than 4Gb RAM, they disabled it for consumer OSes.

Server OSes tend to use fewer and more generic drivers that don't suffer, plus they had a need to use large amounts of RAM. For this reason, it was supported.
 
csmager said:
Marketing reasons? Why would they care? Your windows license allows you to use either 32 or 64-bit Windows, and they don't get any more money either way. I've never seen any MS advertising around the 64/32 argument - I think it would go over the heads of most of the general public.

PAE was enabled circa Windows 2000 and gave a large amount of unforseen problems with drivers that weren't expecting addresses that large, truncated them, and then promptly brought the whole system crashing down. Instead of persuing it, which was probably a waste of time as not many home users would have been using more than 4Gb RAM, they disabled it for consumer OSes.

Server OSes tend to use fewer and more generic drivers that don't suffer, plus they had a need to use large amounts of RAM. For this reason, it was supported.
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Actually in Windows 2000 it was only supported in Windows 2000 Advanced Server and Datacenter Server editions (Server editions) in all of the sources I've checked. (If you wish to be absolutely precise, it can be enabled in client OS's but it doesn't really let you address any more physical memory as it is artificially limited).

They didn't support it in their 32 bit consumer editions because that would encroach on the server market - supporting in excess of 3.5GB of physical RAM would clearly have made the client operating systems overlap with the domain of server operating systems as those were [in the main] the only machines that used large amounts of RAM until a relatively short time ago.

Enabling people to use a cheap version of the operating system to install a load of RAM and potentially use it for serving (albeit potentially sub-optimally compared to a proper server OS), would not make any marketing sense.

I think you have misunderstood what I was articulating in the previous post - I was primarily referring to pre-64bit Microsoft OS's. Furthermore I don't understand the "applications would crash" argument, because each individual application was *never* given access to any more than 2GB of memory - exactly as without PAE, it just meant you could spawn many extra applications.

ref: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/pae_os.mspx
 
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There's far more artificial limitations in client OSes to deter your from using them as servers than PAE. File sharing connection limits, for example.

Applications are not an issue - I didn't say they were. It's drivers.

Taken from this thread, one of the few this discussion's been had in.

Mark Russinovich said:
What they found was that many of the systems would crash, hang, or become unbootable because some device drivers, commonly those for video and audio devices that are found typically on clients but not servers, were not programmed to expect physical addresses larger than 4GB. As a result, the drivers truncated such addresses, resulting in memory corruptions and corruption side effects. Server systems commonly have more generic devices and with simpler and more stable drivers, and therefore hadn't generally surfaced these problems. The problematic client driver ecosystem led to the decision for client SKUs to ignore physical memory that resides above 4GB, even though they can theoretically address it.
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It also alludes to this in the article you reference, under 'Driver Issues'. This is the reason they artificially limited PAE to 4Gb, to prevent people running PAE complaining about crashes. It was too much effort to get all the issues ironed our for a comparitively tiny proportion of the consumer market who might want more than 4Gb.
 
PAE was great in its time but x86-64 is far far better.

Of course, let there be no mistake, both are complete and utter hacks. But x64 is a hack that just happens to work better and provide more benefits.

Microsoft puts much stricter licensing limits on PAE than x64, too.
 
csmager said:
There's far more artificial limitations in client OSes to deter your from using them as servers than PAE. File sharing connection limits, for example.

Applications are not an issue - I didn't say they were. It's drivers.

Taken from this thread, one of the few this discussion's been had in.



It also alludes to this in the article you reference, under 'Driver Issues'. This is the reason they artificially limited PAE to 4Gb, to prevent people running PAE complaining about crashes. It was too much effort to get all the issues ironed our for a comparitively tiny proportion of the consumer market who might want more than 4Gb.
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lol I didn't state or imply anywhere that was the only limitation - I think you're taking it out of context, my entire point was simply that it is possible to address in excess of 3.5GB of RAM on a 32 bit OS, but Microsoft didn't implement it in client operating systems [to the extent that there was any point in writing drivers that worked with it]. It is obviously possible, Linux has had it for many, many years if you wanted it. There is very little point in fixing drivers to remedy any PAE problems in a version of windows that is limited to 4GB anyway (you might gain a few hundred MB at best).

“32-bit client versions of Windows Vista will never support more than a 4GB address spaces, even with PAE enabled” (same for XP SP2 incidentally).

Anyway this is all diverging from the simple point I was stating, they could have put it in initially, but they didn't because it would make no sense (incidentally a reason for large memory space could be just for number crunching scientific applications [or threads] which simply require large amounts of memory and CPU power).

Even the 64 bit 'client' versions have memory limitations applied to them
e.g.
# Home Basic: 8GB
# Home Premium: 16GB
# Professional: 192GB

It seems many of the driver issues were assumptions of driver writers could make under standard 32 bit OSes to do with structs such as buffer alignments and bit-level operations, which would have been correctable with relatively small changes if there was any real point in doing that for the OS (as alluded to above, there really wasn't).
 
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