Slowly but surely. Back in the XP days only hard core users ran 64 bit (talking about desktop systems here, not servers). With Vista we saw 64 bit offerings more common, even in retail channels/outlets, and tier-1 vendors like Dell, HP, etc. With Windows 7, seems to be near..if not at least...50% of the sales now.
Very much seems to be now. Walking through my local computer store around 80% were 64bit and all manufacturers recommending expressed 64. Also been reading alittle about 128bit speculation.
I would not really worry about 128bit for along time. The only reason people ended up being forced to move to 64bit was because of ram issues. I don't see that happening to 64bit for ALONG time to come.
Recently, someone on this forum mentioned a problem concerning 64 bit systems and regular harddrives. The latter being too slow. Supposedly, solid state drives were needed/desired. Does anyone have an issue with this ?
It will be replaced sooner or later. Also seems trnedy to be using x64. That's the gist of the whole story.
Oh, I've found it (post #16): https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=259894&highlight=solid state
I never heard of that, it's simply someones claim, and quite frankly..it doesn't even make sense. I mean, yeah..SSD is faster....after working with quite a few of them and having one, I agree. But "problems" or "bad performance" from running 64 bit on traditional spindle drives like some Seagate 'Cuda...no way, Windows 64 runs just fine on them, I'm typing from one right now.
there is no problem using 64 bit some features are quite fast in 64 bit but if you use average as day to day use not special gaming......etc 32 bit and 64 make you see hardly any difference in performance but some how i thing great i see about 32bit is videos are pretty much clearer in them you compare vista 32 vs vista 64 or i got fedora 32 and 64 i see 32 bit provides much clarity in playing videos
Not to take the thread OT here, but I read an interesting blog from Bill Pytlovany (WinPatrol developer, Microsoft MVP)
IMO 64 bit can be an advantage for power users,cad,photohop,3D,video and the like but for every day use,web,office its largely overkill,i can't see any benefit for most of us. I use 32 bit XP proff. with 8 gig ram and no hiccup whatsoever with photoshop and single files that can grow up to 500MB.
I expected the question lol To get around 32 bit memory limitation (windows 32 bit is 4 gig max.) i use the remaining 4 gig as a ramdisk Taskmanager show 4 gig which is right because it can only see 4 gig at the most. Memory not visible to the OS is used as a ramdisk(4gig) and it shows up as a regular disk in diskmanagement and assigned a letter to it. Benefit > I can keep the whole photoshop pagefile(scratchdisk) in memory,more specific in ramdisk and the difference as opposed to swab data to disk is spectacular.
Correct me if I am wrong, a 32-bit OS can only address 4 GB of RAM. Since by default your devices and other peripherals have precedence over you (the user), so the OS allocates memory to them first, the remaining is what is available to you which is around 3.2-3.5 GB (it varies between different systems). I am assuming your photoshop pagefile does not consume the entire 4 GB of the ramdisk, so what do you do with the remaining wasted RAM? Seriously, with 8 GB of RAM you should consider upgrading to a 64 bit OS, as you are just wasting RAM.
The OS know nothing about RAM exceeding the Ram what the OS as a max. can address on 32 bit windows its 4 gig,userspace is about 3,2 gig. Beyond 4 gig all the remaining installed RAM(invisible memory) is not recognized by the OS but can be used as a ramdisk. The total installed Ram is only visible in the Bios or on the POST screens. For one thing i speak from experience with my specified setup !! There is no wasted RAM or wasted Ramdisk space its more the opposite,with editing a 60 MB image file(16 bit) in photoshop with layers and stuff the photoshop page file grow easily beyond 4 gig and then has to write to disk with slows the whole down a bit. Since my Mobo can only manage 8 gig RAM i have to live by that but in principle if your mobo support far more then that, let say 64 gig then its possible to assign 60 gig to a ramdisk. For me to upgrade to 64 bit windows is at the moment a waste of money because i have to buy new the 64 bit versions of my essential photoshop plugins.And i am not talking about peanuts you know.
Hi Huupi, is ramdisk similar to Readyboost for Vista/Win7? I'm using a 2 GB USB stick in my Win7 x64 setup with 2 GB RAM (soon to be 4GB) and I get a tremendous speed boost opening applications.
Not similar,Ram is volatile and flashmemory is not.Also Ram is much faster in every aspect. With some Ramdisk app. there is a opportunity to save what is in memory as a file to disk,next time you start the OS the data will be then in memory so in a way its similar to readyboost on steroids ! Im only familiar with XP so i have no experience with readyboost.
Well, this is a valid reason for not upgrading. I agree 100% with your explanation about 32-bit OS, RAM and about the usage of Ramdisk. Since I do not use photoshop so I did not know that photoshop's pagefile can consume around 4 GB of RAM in a given session, that is why I commented about possible RAM wastage.
Since i have 5DMK2 and RAW files are around 120 MB(16 bit) the scratchdisk(pagefile) can grow in no time to 9 gig. In my system RAM is now the bottleneck,but as earlier said i have a total of 8 gig installed so for the time being i have set a second internal sata disk to be functioning as second scratchdisk,in this situation Photoshop has to write to disk and the whole become a bit slower. Im contemplating to get a new 64 bit system with lots of RAM or install a new MOBO which support lets say 24 gig of RAM.
