win 7

[+X RAY]

Soon I'll move to win 7 too.

just to know how 's better 32 or 64?

[+Typhoid]

if your computer will only handle 32, don't upgrade and expect your flight sims to run!!

 

64 or nothing and make sure the hardware and video card will handle it.

 

I managed to "upgrade" my mid-grade flight sim capable XP machine into an email and file server on W7 32. New computer/hardware upgrades pending.................

[MoonGoose]

well Seven 64bit is a must if you have more than 3Gb of RAM...

 

is compatible with 32bit compiled applications but really shines with 64bit applications.

[+PureBlue]

go for 64bit. as MG points out, you need it if you got more than 3-4gigs of ram, which is a must these days, IMHO.

[JediMaster]

I decided to stay 32-bit this upgrade round. There's really not enough native 64-bit stuff for it to be important, and I'm only losing about 500MB of my 4GB of RAM. I also run a lot of older programs and I just figured I didn't want to deal with the hassle.

Come Windows 8 or whatever MS calls it, that's when I'll take the 64-bit plunge and will likely get more than 4GB of RAM.

[+X RAY]

My specs are:

Intel E 8500 dual 3.16ghz

nvidia gtx280 1024

Asus p5nd MB

4 gb of ram

[MoonGoose]

I decided to stay 32-bit this upgrade round. There's really not enough native 64-bit stuff for it to be important, and I'm only losing about 500MB of my 4GB of RAM. I also run a lot of older programs and I just figured I didn't want to deal with the hassle.

Come Windows 8 or whatever MS calls it, that's when I'll take the 64-bit plunge and will likely get more than 4GB of RAM.

 

seven 64 can handle almost any 32bit app... but you're probably right.. if you lose only 500Mb and you need a lot of backward compatibility then you'll be fine.

 

to be sure not to have problems with older apps i leaved my old XP 32bit in a partition with a bootloader just in case.

[FastCargo]

I've been running Win7 64 for a while now and the amount of programs not compatible with it I could count on one hand. Most stuff either ran right out of the box, had a patch or easy workaround.

 

FC

[Lexx_Luthor]

Win~7 won't run DOS programs (what programs?). Never mind.

 

But, I have old DOS hard drive I plug in for that, unplug the Win-7 drive. I Boot up MSDOS 6.22 and everything is lightning fast. Its amazing old software and some old hardware still work perfectly with today's gear.

 

I've done alot of Fortran programming in DOS, stuff I still use. The Fortran is 32bit. So when I use this stuff, I run 32bit software on a 16bit operating system on 64bit hardware (64bit AMD, 4GB DDR3, 790FX motherboard, etc...).

 

It works. I transfer my Fortran compiler to the old Microsoft DOS ram-drive, using RAM to simulate a hard drive. Compile times are like 30 times faster now then back in the day. I can't use near the 4GB of memory, but the DDR3 and new cpu are many times faster than the old RDRAM and Pentium-1 of the mid 1990s.

[Fubar512]

...but the DDR3 and new cpu are many times faster than the old RDRAM and Pentium-1 of the mid 1990s.

 

RDRAM is Ram bus memory, which was first made available for Pentium III-based systems in 1999 (it had been used in game-consoles prior to this). DRAM, on the other hand, is a general term (Dynamic Random Access Memory).

 

Back In the mid 1990s, or almost a decade after I started building systems for fun & profit, the first Pentiums used what was then marketed as FPM-DRAM (Fast Page Mode DRAM), and later, EDO-DRAM (Extended Data Out DRAM). By 1997, SDRAM (Synchronus DRAM) was starting to predominate. And that's all for today's history lesson.

[+Brain32]

Haha I remember those day, my buddy had 32MB of EDO on P1 166MHz, we were like: "Dude do you secretly work for NASA or what?"

[Lexx_Luthor]

Fubar::

RDRAM is Ram bus memory

Right, DRAM. Its been too long. The only 1990s gear I still use are the old hard drives, well that and IBM Model M home defense keyboard with recoil numpad. Forgot everything else from back then.

[JediMaster]

Come on, nothing beat an MFM hard drive!

 

We had one in a shop I used to work at 15 years ago. It was a full-height 5.25" beast that had to weigh more than most 17" laptops do now. The neat thing was the drive motor was a runaway for whatever reason. If you plugged it in, the RPM spun up to some ungodly amount that made a whine you could hear throughtout the building. The best part was if you sat on a swivel stool with it and tilted it left or right it was a strong gyroscope and you would spin around, at least until the power cable stopped you.