Stop the presses!

I’m admitting that I may have been wrong. Yup. That’s right. I MAY have been wrong…

Last summer I battled with 64-bit Vista and lost. I wrote about the experience here and here and here. One of my readers — a young computer genius named Paul from St. Norbert took issue with me in the comments saying…

Used x64 Vista for a full year… contrary to what they told me, all of my 32-bit drivers worked just like they were supposed to. The speed increase over XP was enormous.

Upgraded to win7×64 the day it came out, even better…

Granted most of my software is still 32-bit, but a 64-bit processor will run in 32-bit mode anyway – it just uses half of the register length. I don’t see why using x64 should slow anything down…

Well, contrary to what my wife and children say I’m not close-minded. At least not on technology issues. Or something like that. Let’s not go there…

Anyway, I had a chance to use Windows 7 64-bit on a project for a week. My assessment? It doesn’t suck. Far from it. I hesitate to say it, but it may even rock!

I told Paul that I may need to write a mea culpa and this post from Gizmodo just pushed me over the ‘confession edge’ [if you catch my drift]…

“You might’ve skipped the Vista train, thinking it was like Under Siege 2, minus Steve Seagal. Or not. Either way, you’re probably gonna jump onboard Windows 7. When you do, it’s time to go 64-bit.

Who Should Go 64-bit?

Basically, anyone geeky enough to read this. If you have an Intel Core 2 Duo or newer processor, you’ve got a 64-bit CPU, and you should install the 64-bit version of Windows 7 to play with. (Here’s how. You’ve got like 5 days left, BTW.) Microsoft itself is pimping 64-bit over 32-bit now and notebook makers have already started pushing 64-bit Windows Vista over 32-bit. Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard will be 64-bit down to its kernel, so you won’t be alone by any means. 64-bit is going mainstream.

Why Should I?

We explained what’s so awesome about 64-bit in detail a couple months ago, but to recap in a single word: Memory. With 32-bit Windows, you’re stuck at 4GB of RAM, and even then, you’re only using about 3.3GB of it, give or take. With 64-bit, 4GB of RAM is the new minimum standard, and with 4GB, you can run tons of applications with zero slowdown. Windows 7 (and Vista for that matter) runs so beautifully with 4GB of RAM you’ll wonder how you ever did with less. It makes your system more futureproof too, so you can take your system to 8GB, 32GB or even a terabyte, before too long.” Source: Why You Should Go 64-Bit With Windows 7 – Windows Vista – Gizmodo

If you’re ‘geeky enough to read this’ you’ll want to go to the source to read the rest of the article — especially the part about the “64-bit Sniggles”. Me? As luck would have it, the hard drive in my computer failed last week and I’ll be rebuilding it today. As a 64-bit machine. See? Old dogs CAN learn new tricks! Sometimes…

Thanks, Paul!

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Tagged as: Add new tag, Central processing unit, Intel Core 2, Microsoft, Microsoft Windows, Operating system, Windows 7, Windows Vista, Windows XP