I have been running 64bit since xp64 came out. was crap then but once vista 64 was around it was rock on. Biggest problem with 64bit windows is that is you are running the home version it doesn't auto set up 32bit programs to run proper. win 7 64 pro or higher is rock your socks.


i would get AMD and not spend more then $100 on a cpu. Any current gen cpu will work great and there is no need for any of the brand new super speed crap. You will never find your self in a situation where you need the power at home.

i would also get a ATI 69XX in the 2gb range as if your gaming spending your money on a gpu will make everything run better over spend a lot on a cpu.

Would also pick up 8gb of duel or triple channel in the $150 range.

 

Made a windows 7 bootable USB thingey to install... I'm guessing this is gonna take about 20 minutes now

 

The sooner everyone is running 64 bit windows, the sooner all your **** will work.

there is only ONE thing I can't do in 64 bit software that is really rather random.

Creo Elements/PRO (nee Pro/ENGINEER) wildfire 3 omits the "generate PDF" function in the 64 bit version. The 32 bit version runs fine on Win7 x64 and will generate PDFs just fine. Only drawback is it doesn't let me run Aero.

I am so convinced by 64 bit OS that I made my wife get her new laptop with it. She's never had a complaint about it. She probably is oblivious to the fact that anything changed.

 

There's one benefit to the x64 OSes that seems to remain unspoken: support for more than 3.xx gigs of RAM.

I've got 8 GB in my home machine, and I have paging turned off completely. Even with two dozen tabs open in Chrome at any given time and a VM or two running in the background, I have yet to experience a low memory condition.

 

Well to be fair, many 32bit versions of windows (and most flavors of Linux) actually DO support more than 4gb of memory(3.xx once you factor in video memory) via physical address extension. The only hard limitation is that each process is limited to a 4gb virtual address space.

 

having reached the memory limit on a 32 bit OS, I'm right there with Joe. Again, Pro/E was my reason for moving to something that could handle more than 4gb of memory for a single process.

Unfortunately the official maximum memory for my thinkpad is 4gb... but unofficially it can work with 8gb.

 

Eh?

I've got XP Pro 32 / Win7 32 installed on several machines, all of which have either 4 or 5 GB of RAM on them, and none report more than 3.xx GB of RAM usable in the OS. (And no, I am not "sharing" system memory with a video card.)

My desktop machine at work for instance:



(does some googling...)

Hmm. Looks like this only works on certain Enterprise / Datacenter editions of Windows, and is limited on client versions "for driver compatibility and licensing reasons, even though these versions do run in PAE mode if NX support is enabled." (source)

 

Just wanna say that this i5 is awesome... Emulating like a ******* bawse... no lag anywhere... I can run it about twice as fast as normal game speed in turbo mode, which is very helpful since I lost my save games because they were on an IDE drive..