What do I need to know using 64 bit win 7?

Factual Questions
1

I finally took the plunge and got Win 7 Pro 64 bit on my new Dell laptop.

What issues are there that I need to know and watch out for?

I’ve heard using a 32 bit driver will drastically slow things down? I hoping/trusting that all of Dell’s drivers on this 1 week old laptop are 64 bit. But, I had to buy a 2 port Firewire express card. I got a bad feeling it is 32 bit. Is that an issue?

What about software? I think theres a 64 bit WinRAR and a 32 bit one? QuickPar is 32 bit. I’ve heard theres some 64 bit browsers? I didn’t see a 64 bit Firefox and just used the regular FF on their web site.

Do I really need to seek out 64 bit software and avoid 32 bit?

How is 64 bit going to bite me on the ass? What’s the catch? I’m comfortable with Win 7, but 64 bit is new too me.

2

You can assume software for 32 bit Windows will work unless the vendor offers 32 bit and 64 bit versions. Drivers are a bit trickier, but for a week old machine, I think that 64 bit drivers would probably be available.

If a 64 bit version of anything is available, it will be better than the 32 bit, even if the 32 bit version will work.

3

32 bit drivers won’t work; 32 bit software generally will. There are 64 bit drivers for pretty much everything currently sold.

Really, you’ll be fine. Only very specialised software and older games cause problems.

4

There is no reason to think that this should be true. In fact, the opposite is usually the case.

5

I use Windows 7 Pro (64 bit) at home with all software apps originally from Windows XP Pro (32 bit). Other than very specific 64-bit software I later acquired, everything (32 bit) works with no problems.

6

How about Microsoft Office? I have the 2003 version which is Win 7 compatible (theres a MS patch for it) But it’s 32 bit software.

I use some video editing software. VLC player, audio editor etc. I do a lot of multimedia.

I’m nervous but glad I finally got on the 64 bit train. Any speed increase that I achieve will make my video rendering go much quicker.

7

No problem.

No problem.

8

Just downloaded WinRAR 5.0 64 bit. I’ll have to buy it within 40 days.

I need to make sure it still creates a standard RAR archive. I don’t want to create an archive that a 32 bit Win user can’t read.

I no longer install PKZip because win 7 reads, creates, and updates zip files. No need to install it anymore.

9

Your concerns are a little out-of-date. 64-bit was made “the standard” for Windows Vista back in 2007. Even when Windows 7 first came out, all of these issues were (by and large) settled.

Your CPU still runs 32-bit software as well as it ever did; the only difference is that now it’s capable of running 64-bit software as well.

The only catch is you can no longer run 16-bit software. So wave goodbye to Microsoft Bob. :slight_smile:

EDIT: I just read your post about video encoding. 64-bit won’t make a difference here, sorry. What will is getting a video card that supports CUDA technology; Sony Vegas using CUDA runs about twice as fast as when using the CPU alone.

10

Fair enough, I will concede this.

11

If you have more than 4GB of RAM, you’ll need 64-bit software to utilize all of it. It may or may not affect video editing speed, depending on the particular operations you’re doing and how much stuff regularly gets loaded into RAM.

If you want REALLY fast video editing, get 16 or 32 GB of RAM and create a RAM disk out of it (but back up often).

Bit-ness has nothing to do with the archives created, although file size might. Older computers might not support RAR files larger than 4 GB, for example. That’s a product of the filesystem (FAT vs NTFS, etc.) and not whether your software is 32 or 64 bit.

In any case, there’s no reason to be making RAR files anymore. They’re proprietary, slow, bloated, and unpopular.

ZIP is fine for 90% of uses and works out-of-the-box with most major operating systems (Windows, OSX, Android, Linux). For purposes where RAR’s better compression is needed, 7-zip is free, open-source, faster, and compresses better. And anybody who knows how to open a RAR file these days will likely be able to open a 7z file as well, and if not, you can always make self-extracting 7z archives. Let RAR die already.

Or if you have a 2nd-generation or later Intel Core i3/i5/i7 CPU, using the onboard graphics processor together with software that supports “Intel Quick Sync” is even faster than CUDA. The difference is still dramatic even with the latest, 4th-generation CPUs and modern GPUs.

In other words: Don’t waste money on a video card if editing is what you want to do. Buy a solid state disk or more RAM for the laptop instead. EDIT: On a laptop, you probably wouldn’t be getting an external video card anyway. But you CAN choose to not use CUDA in favor of Quick Sync, if your CPU and software supports it.

12

Glad someone mentioned 16 bit software. I have a solitaire game we bought in 1997 and ran under win 98. Since then it’s been installed on XP and then Win 7. My mom loves playing solitaire and plays every day. It’s running on her Win 7 32 bit pc.

sure hope it’s not 16 bit. No way to know except to try it. The install just unpacks the files in a folder and I create a shortcut to the exe file. It doesn’t modify Windows. Won’t hurt to try it.

13

I started using 64-bit ( linux ) around 2005 exclusively; and it wasn’t that special back then, at least in linux terms.
Unless one is one of the hold-outs for using XP, or using a computer whose only real purpose should be as a firewall — which is almost the same thing, judging by XP users — there is no point to still using 32-bit.
And I never change at all unless the change is for the better. Change is for the weak.

14

Windows 7 comes with Solitaire already, though you might have toturn it on if you don’t see it.

15

Interesting tip on the Intel QuickSync, thanks. I might have to buy me a new computer soon… I didn’t know it was so much faster than CUDA, that’s pretty impressive.

16

This is true, 32-bit is often the “primary”, default development fork even nowadays. 64-bit is usually compiled for after the fact, or an experimental build.

For some things, like text editors, it usually doesn’t matter. But for a lot of things, this means that the 32-bit version is a lot more stable. For instance, I think the 64-bit version of Half-Life 2 had a lot of issues with crashing.

17

For me, that was a big catch. I stupidly got the 64 bit version and now several important programs will not run. Bummer. Not Bob. :wink:

18

I’m not even going to try installing my COBOL compiler. I have it on my tower pc to use when I’m programming at home. It dates back to 1999. Works fine on Win 7 32 bit. But the run time library interfaces with the Win API calls and I’d probably have issues in a 64 bit environment. There’s a routine called Dialogue that lets me create forms in Windows, radio buttons, all the GUI features. It’s calling the API behind the scenes. I don’t really need it on the laptop anyway.

19

There’s one important difference- if he’s running a 32 bit version of Windows, he can only use 4 gb of RAM, while 64 bit lets you use quite a bit more.

More memory = better & faster for video editing and other things like that. Plus, if big numbers (i.e. larger than 32 bit) need to be manipulated, 64 bit can do it in a single operation, unlike 32 bit.

20

Especially if you mean firewall in the traditional sense, rather than in the computer sense.