Think about it...

I don't have to, because I've upgraded to a SSD along with the RAM upgrade (; . A few milliseconds more or less are irrelevant. Both browser versions start up almost instantly, and once you've opened IE some components are probably cached by the OS, so subsequent launches will be faster than the initial launch.

And no, I don't see the contradiction. We're talking about a modern machine here, which means fast and large harddisks (compared to, for instance, the P4 era). There may be more data to process, but the hardware is more than capable to deal with this increase.

Come to think of it, we should probably both be scolding eL_PuSHeR for not having 8GB of RAM in a machine like that in the first place (; .

EDIT: added the quote, this thread is going too fast for me... (;

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

So you are saying 64 bit is smaller? Sure about that?

Er, no, I didn't say that at all. Did you read the whole post?

SquallStrife wrote:

Er, no, I didn't say that at all.

Good, just checking!

ADDiCT wrote:

A few milliseconds more or less are irrelevant.

We're talking about a modern machine here, which means fast and large harddisks (compared to, for instance, the P4 era).

Ah change of tune 😀

Now the question of relevance is another one. I totally agree that once you have 8 or 16GB of Ram, a fast i7 and a SSD drive, the argument goes out the window, because W7 32 bit doesn't make sense with so much memory.

But it doesn't change the point I was raising is valid.

Don't join a discussion about fundamentals, when you are really about the practicality...

ADDiCT wrote:

this thread is going too fast for me... (;

Hehe try to keep up with the old farts 🤣

The practicality is that there's no reason not to go 64 bit now, even with 4GB. The OS is mature, the drivers are available, and if he ever decides to add more RAM later down the track, he won't need to reinstall. And if he ever does want to run some 64-bit application, it can use all 4GB of his ram, not just 3 and a bit. It's a win win.

In my experience the performance hit of the WOW64 layer is so small as to be non-existent, especially on a fast quad core machine.

SquallStrife wrote:

In my experience the performance hit of the WOW64 layer is so small as to be non-existent, especially on a fast quad core machine.

Agreed!

And for practicallity I totally agree with you guys! I also have W7 64 installed 🤣

But that context should be included!

This guy did some benchmarking between 32 and 64 bit code:

http://www.osnews.com/story/5768/Are_64-bit_B … inaries_/page1/

The conclusion is similar to what we find:

So while the tests I ran were on only a few applications and in limited ways, the results seem to show that indeed 64-bits do generally run slower. However, there are there are a few issues to consider.

It's one of these topics, where the fundamentals don't matter because hardware has exploded past the point where you can make valid comparisons.

Ram is so cheap now that I recommend anyone to go with 8GB DDR3 for their new builds.

Mau1wurf1977, don't you think it's about time to stop at this point? A "benchmark comparison" from 2004, done on a Sun machine (sporting a whopping 256MB of RAM) running Solaris is not exactly what I would call good argumentation material in the context of this thread (; .

ADDiCT wrote:

Mau1wurf1977, don't you think it's about time to stop at this point? A "benchmark comparison" from 2004, done on a Sun machine running Solaris is not exactly what I would call good argumentation material (; .

I think we all arrived at the same page now...

But hey, if you want to dance some more, let's dance 🤣

Show me your benchmarks please!

Just because they are from 2004 and on Sun, doesn't make it any less valid. Unless you can explain why?

Heheheee...

Just because they are from 2004 and on Sun, doesn't make it any less valid. Unless you can explain why?

Well, vastly different (and ancient!) hardware and OS architectures, for starters.

Hmmm... I think I've seen "application benchmarks" when looking for harddisk reviews. You know, based on defined tasks like "word processing" or "web surfing" or something. If there is a benchmarking tool that's working that way it would actually be possible to compare 32-bit and 64-bit Windows versions, on the same hardware running the same apps. Unfortunately, I'm very busy with work (and arguing on forums (; ) atm, otherwise that'd be an interesting little project.

His benchmarks are flawed because he used the same compiler, and made no changes to the source code. If he optimised the source code for 64 bit processors, he'd have gotten better scores.

If anything, his test showed that more could be done to optimise compilers and source code for 64 bit CPUs.

He may as well have been benchmarking x86 vs PPC using Intel's C compiler.

The challenge is to find applications which are available as 32 and 64 editions.

If the benchmarks works with MS Office based applications, we will more or less investigate the performance impact of WOW64, which isn't what we want.

Crysis is available in both versions, but AFAIK the 64 bit version offers better graphics, so that is another thing worth considering.

But yea, instead of spending time on testing this, might be more efficient to just buy 8GB of DDR3 🤣

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Crysis is available in both versions, but AFAIK the 64 bit version offers better graphics, so that is another thing worth considering.

The 64 bit version is pretty much just a "use more memory" modification.

The trouble is that modifying code to take advantage of a higher "bitness" is a lot of work.

It's almost the same as going from CPU code to GPGPU code.

You start thinking about low level things like manipulating multiple small values as one large value, and those are changes that're not really practical in something huge like openssl or mysql, without almost total rewrites.

The consequence of this is that right now benchmarks are useless. You're not benchmarking 32 vs 64, you're benchmarking compilers and libraries against themselves with different options.

Compiling to x64 gives access to the increased register set of the AMD/Intel x64 architecture - that's a *significant* benefit to most code in having more data available directly on-chip in another register (and not just spatially local in the cache). Modern compilers will automatically optimise to do that for you, too.

On my i7 with 6GB RAM I never use IE64, so it is not prefetched. I generally don't use IE at all, but when I do, I use the 32-bit version because of the lack of a 64-bit version of Flash. Trying your challenge both opened near instantaneously. far too brief to measure without some kind of tool. However, I imagine that at least part of the IE engine loads with Windows.

I had the beta version of XP64 and liked it, but didn't buy it because of the lack of support for drivers, etc. I had Vista 64 for a little while while I was waiting for Win7 to be released. Again, manufacturers were still slow to release 64-bit drivers. With Win7 sales of the 64-bit version have comprised a very large part of the total sales. Drivers are no longer an issue, except, perhaps for older hardware.

Objections about disk space and memory usage are rather moot, given how big and cheap hard disks and RAM are today. It is time to let go of the past (except for classic games) and take advantage of modern hardware. Oh, and another advantage of having a lot of RAM is that you can give a guest VM plenty of RAM without starving the host.

Hello guys. I have been reading those long posts you have written. Interesting stuff.

I think I am going to stay with W7 x86 for now. The main reason is that I still use some 16/32 bit console application that refuse to load under a x64 Operating System (and I am too lazy to be lauching a VM).

I have been testing my sister's laptop (Intel dual core, 4GB DDR3) which it has W7 64 bits already installed. Speedwise seems as good as x86 version and it allows to see almost all memory (tried the x86 version on this same laptop and useable memory was 2.93Gb out of 4GB).

So using a x64 OS seems to be imperative for 4GB+ of RAM. Right now I don't believe I am going to see a massive improvement with my current setup by switching to w7 x64. Everything is running fine as is.

I agree W7 x64 is more mature that XP x64 was. The performance penalties are surely minimal between x86 and x64, specially on modern hardware. Keep in mind that my current setup is already somewhat old (first Phenom with the TLB bug, not so fast RAM, not so fast HD...)

I think you get the picture. Anyway, you learn a lot by reading these lengthy posts. Thank you all of you.

BTW: I forgot to say that the "4GB-RAMPatch-Multilingual-12.7.2010" DOESN'T WORK for me. When executed it does just nothing. I hope it won't be a virus. Has anyone been bold enough to try it? Maybe it's just for Home editions only (I am using Professional edition).

I don't think it's been mentioned yet, but another advantage of using a 64-bit version of Windows is that you can boot in UEFI mode (if your mainboard supports that, of course).

The main advantage of UEFI booting is that it will ignore any executable code in the MBR.

So, none of the MBR viruses and rootkits will be able to infect you.

Sometime in the future I guess that hackers will find a way to exploit UEFI, but they haven't yet.

If you switch to UEFI now you'll be able to enjoy the immunity in the meantime 😀