x86-64 vs x64

[freedquaker]

Pemalite said:

freedquaker said:

Well, do you notice that you understood my words the way you wanted to understand? Because I never talked about the application memory size or hard disc allocation size. I was merely talking about the WINDOWS itself. So it is a comparison of 64 BIT WINDOWS vs 32 BIT WINDOWS, not 32 bit apps vs 64 bit apps. All the points I have made are true and measured and felt and experienced personally by me, as I have 6 freaking laptops and desktops which run both 64 bit and 32 bit versions of Windows 7 (in addition to XP and Linux)......

.....There are dozens of other reasons why 32 bit Windows 7 is better suited to me than a 64 bit one. But this is true for Windows. My argument is specific to Windows, because I can't say the same thing for most Linux distros. Linux Mint 64 bit, for example, is easily better than its 32 bit counterpart in almost every way.

...That was your own fault for using vague bullet points that is open to interpretation outside of your origional intention, thus the fault isn't mine,...

...Guess what? 32bit Windows would be next to useless for me, considering an application I might use might end up chewing through 10+ Gigabytes of Ram...

...the more Ram you have, the less Windows will use the pagefile......the biggest limiter to a PC is the hard drive. (Hence why you saw big gains with a Ram Drive.)

... right now I have roughly 40Gb of data in cache, sitting in the Ram, systems with similar circumstances would benefit greatly from being 64bit and having a ton of Ram....

I also cleaned up my Windows 7 64bit install so it fits onto a 4Gb USB 3.0 flash drive and only kept the drivers I need for each specific system I have, the fully decompressed install is roughly 10Gb and installs in about 5 minuits.

The best upgrade for any PC is an SSD...

 

Well, I actually enjoy this conversation and I'm glad that this doesn't turn into a heated pointless one. I highlighted all the points I want to mention and respond to.

- I take some of the blame for being a bit vauge but you should agree that this whole discussion is about Windows. I started the discussion for whether or not to upgrade to the 64 bit of Windows and even the bulet points start with 32 bit Windows 7... Anyway, who cares? I certainly don't care about "being right", .... but I do care about "finding out the right information", and you seem like a good source of such information, so let's move on...

- I can see how useless 32 bit may be to you, and I agree. But also keep in mind that this is a highly professional heavy user case that is a small minority except hardcore PC gamers who need to go 64 bit anyway. I'm a power user, since the heydays of Commodre 64 but I am a not professional tech geek (no disrespect intended), so my needs are different. So to me (and I believe the vast majority of users who are not hardcore PC gamers), 64 bit Windows is CURRENTLY unnecessary.

- All you said about pagefile is correct but I also found out that on Windows (not sure about Linux), when you disable the pagefile entirely, even though Windows uses no hard drive access, there is no performance delta. So enabling pagefile doesn't actually make your PC slower, it just enables you to keep more data on RAM than otherwise impossible. And of course, keeping this EXTRA data slows down your system due to hard drive. I am also aware of RAMDisk ever since the Amiga Times, and have always been a fan of it. It's great that we have so much RAM available to us so that even a Virtual Machine on my disposal is so much faster than any other regular PC out there!

- Again 40 GB cache file in RAM means you're a heavy professional PC user, which I am not. So your needs are vastly different than mine, and I do respect that. There is just NOT one ideal solution, depends on people and their idosyncratic needs.

- The problem with your 4GB 64 bit Windows 7 is that it requires 10 GB installation, which is huge. It's doable in 64 bit. In order to fit so much space on a RAM Disk, my system needs to have at least 24 GB of RAM. That's too much for a laptop to ask, and I only have one desktop, which I don't think supports this much RAM. I was talking about a 4 GB installation for the entire 32 bit Windows 7 (of course I disabled all pagefile, hibernation, unnecessary drivers, updates, languages etc). I also allocate 2 GB to it as actual RAM. So an 8 GB RAM system is sufficient for the task (8 GB is close to upperbound on laptops). 2 GB (Main System) + (2GB VM RAM) + 4 GB (Ramdisk).  It's highly useful to keep the system in 32 bit as 32 bit apps have smaller footprint in memory as well as Hard disc installation. This alone cannot be done in 64 bit. However, you can probably do the same thing with your 10 GB Windows 7 installation on an SSD. I'd put the Virtual Machine on an SSD and allocate lots of RAM to it.

- I certainly agree with the SSD upgrade as well.

 

So, overall I believe I agree with everything you said, just different NEEDS, different USES, different PERSPECTIVE, different APPROACH. :)