On 19/09/2007, Tim Green timothy.j.green@gmail.com wrote:
Even Microsoft are doing their bit to encourage 64bit Windows since the release of Vista by forcing developers to submit 64bit drivers through Microsoft's driver signing processes before they can submit 32bit drivers for the same hardware.
People might take them up on the offer if they weren't so bloody greedy and forcing people to fork out money for both the 32 and 64-bit versions of Vista.
I have been tempted, in the past, just to buy an Technet Plus CDless subscription so that I just pay 250 quid per year to get everything that I need from them for "unlimited evaluation".
Apart from the limitation of the maximum amount of addressable memory, what are the advantages of going 64bit as a user?
Depends on what you do.
Here in the film industry, 64-bitness is helping with rendering performance and also on the desktop where artists need to use vast chunks of memory for their 3D and even 2D packages. And it also helps in virtualisation. You can do away with dual machine set-ups (i.e. one Linux, one Windows) and having just ONE workstation which has loads of RAM and dual dual core processors running virtualisation software. Works well.
So 64-bitness does help depending on what tasks you give your computer to do. Not worth it for word processing or surfing the Internet, but bloody useful for large computational work.
Regards,
Martyn