I ment no offence at all sir, i was politely trying to say that you are wrong in stating that x64 "is not worth it to most people". The binaries are known to be faster and more secure in every way, and yes - even E-Mail, Web Browsing, Playing/Converting music in iTunes/WMP and Desktop Publishing/Typing are faster in x64 for the reasons i stated already. Namely, faster decoding and encoding of compressed data (Images and Music) and why an x64 Browser is indeed very worthwhile.

Not to mention the memory hog that is IE8 Whenever I open a new tab in IE8 it takes a second to load it. The x64 version of IE8 is nearly instant. But I am still on Firefox 3.5 32-bit anyway, because Adobe STILL havn't released an x64 runtime of Flash 10

None taken.
I respectfully disagree, though - most people care about usability and features, not pure speed. Security probably falls somewhere in the middle. At least, such is my experience. Yours is obviously different, hence our disagreement, which I think we will just have to settle with.

Just so the point isn't lost in the discussion - I do wish we'd move to full 64-bit, I just don't see it happening in the immediate future.

Nono, i do agree with that part. Your completely right, as I said - most people don't care if it's half a second faster or whatever - just so long as it works. And 32-bit is still much more compatible thus more popular

But yeah, for those of us who depend a lot on fancy production stuff, or even who just like to be on bleeding edge, x64 has it's obvious advantages. And that varies per person.

P.S. Thanks for the link to the new site Xxcom9a, I moved it to the top
P.P.S. I've added a couple of new things.

Yeah, I never replied to that one. Microsoft has a tick-tock development process, Me and Vista may have been failures but they were made by different dev teams than XP and Win7. The Me/Vista team pioneered a lot of new and even experimental/buggy features (tick phase), then XP/Win7 refined, improved and streamlined these (tock phase).

Windows Me is actually better than 98 though, when it's all patched up it is a faster and more stable OS than 98SE. It was just a crap-pile when it first came out (like Vista was). Me was the first OS to have System Restore

I remember the humoungous hell that was ME it came with my parent's dell. It cause many a fight, and it was a blight, shocked the world of computing and thier sales were muting, it was loads of stress, just like PMS.

Well, a few corrections. Vista 32 does use PAE - in fact, it's a hardware requirement to use Data Execution Prevention - you need the 64bit TLB registers. So you're translating all 32bit addresses to 64bit registers in the TLB anyway (unless you specifically boot a no DXP 32bit kernel). Secondly, vista32, while having PAE enabled for 99% of users, does happily ignore any reported RAM above the 4gb mark. This means if your BIOS remaps 1gb of RAM to 5gb to make room for the videocard, you're capped at 3gb. It's actually an identical kernel to server 2008, there's a single license key that unlocks >4gb on 32bit processors.

You're partially correct about virtualization as well - there are hardware VT extensions in 32bit processors (or 64bit in 32bit host mode), but they're not as complete as the 64bit AMD set (Intel is (was?) missing some of the IO virtualization, moving more of the work into the hypervisor. VMware refuses to use the 32bit extensions, but Virtualbox does (apparently, I haven't tested).

I'd imagine that running a modern dualcore CPU with a decent videocard could play a bluray (GPU decoding offload) on one monitor while running CS3/CS4 on the other - in either 32 or 64bit mode.

Aside from those minor nits, I agree with you.

I'm not sure I understand any of that. PAE and DEP are two completely different things for a start, you don't need PAE for Software DEP. For Hardware DEP on a 32-bit machine, I was never sure it was possible - but maybe that's what you mean. To get hardware DEP instead of software/emulated DEP, you need 64-bit or PAE?

4GB of RAM is the hard limit for 32-bit systems, it's impossible to have more than 4GB on 32-bit OS. With PAE, the limit is slighlty increased. But you need to remember that all preipherals, every PCI device, requires it's own chunk in the memory pool for Device Drivers to properly address it once the CPU enters Protected Mode because it's then impossible for the OS to probe the BIOS. If I ever see a 32-bit machine with 4GB of RAM available, I will eat my hat. And if I ever see a 32+4=36-bit (PAE enabled) machine with more than 4GB of available RAM for Windows memory pooling, I will eat my entire wardrobe of hats and shirts and etcetera.

Unless there's some freaky new tech I don't know about.


Yeah, that's what I pretty much ment. You can get some hardware virtualization in a 32-bit host, but true hardware virt. comes with a 64-bit OS; i.e., all the fancy extension sets become available when the CPU is in x86-64 mode.


Except I work with 100megapixel+ images half the time, and CS4's private working set ranges between 3GB-4GB of RAM usage as I apply filters. But otherwise, yeah maybe so.


Me went down in history as the king of the BSOD. I remember with my 3DFX card, it would just blue screen before even logging in. Every time one of the millions of hotfixes for Me eventually fixed it though.

what the hell is your commit charge for those HUGE images?!

Lol... not sure, I never have that column visible in Task Manager. From what I remember, Commit Size is a bad way to rate memory usage because it just shows what the size of the current Pool block Windows has allocated to it, rather than how much it's actually using...? Can't remember. But the Private Working Set actually shows how much is physicially in use, minus the caching and swap overhead, without rounding it up to the next pool block limit. Something like that. I need to find a page which describes in detail what all the seven or so (!?!?) different columns for 'Memory' mean.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commit_charge

In computing, commit charge is a term used in Microsoft Windows operating systems to describe the total amount of virtual address space for which the backing store is the pagefile. It may be thought of as the maximum potential pagefile usage.

I have Windows System Resource Manager kill any IE tab where my commit charge is over 500MB. This reduces thrashing of the hard disk. If something is taking up too much commit charge then it is taking space on your paging file and you compie is taking way too much resources for that program and since it is disk activity only basically, it is wearing your hard drive down for something that is not being very productive.

I watch 5 youtube vids and this kicks in! or look at 15 listings on realtor.com for example. This shows that websites need to clean up thier coding. I've seen blogs take up over 10,000 lines of code! and they use flash slideshows and geo widgets and all kinds of mess the commit charge may kick in after just ONE MINUTE on those sites!!!