There are several varieties of 64-bit being expressed these days. 64-bit
hardware such as the CPU are capable of doing individual operations that
have a word length of 64 bits. That is to say, they think in 64-bit
chunks. A 64-bit operating system or other piece of software is written
with 64-bit hardware in mind, using the same word length that the
hardware expects to get its instructions in. 64-bit operating systems
can run 32-bit programs if they can emulate 64-bit instructions to the
hardware. For most 32-bit programs on a 64-bit operating system, there
is not any noticeable difference in how the program behaves. If your
program misbehaves when running on 64-bit Windows, there may be a patch
or other upgrade that can smooth things over. Very rarely, you have to
fool the program by running it within a virtual machine along with a
complete 32-bit operating system. This is the "XP Mode" being touted by
Microsoft as one solution in Windows 7 to compatibility issues. This
virtual machine is software code written to fool the second operating
system into thinking it is running on its own complete set of hardware
instead of inside a software-generated box. Hopefully you don't have to
start tinkering around to that level. It takes some fairly archaic
programming to need XP Mode in order to run properly. The best thing I
can advise is to make sure that if the OS is 64-bit to get 64-bit
drivers for all the hardware devices, and that can help a great deal.
Dell is usually good about providing such drivers. To sum it up, most of
your 32-bit programs will not know the difference running on a 64-bit
operating system, and if they do, Microsoft provided a way for them to
cope. Best wishes.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [PCBUILD] Question 64bit
From: tannis zamora <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, February 03, 2010 6:50 am
To: [log in to unmask]

Good morning everyone,

I am looking to buy a new Dell Studio 17 laptop with Windows 7. All of
the current machines all list 64 bit.

I am very confused. I have a Dell 2200 laptop and a Dell Dimension 2400
desktop. Everything I have is 32 bit.

What is the difference and what will having 64 bit mean exactly?

Does this mean that all of my software programs will not run on the 64
bit Studio 17? 

Am I going to have to replace all of my favorite software programs? I
just don't know enough about this and am very confused? Not even sure I
am asking the right questions.

Thank you for any help you can give.

tannis z TN




 

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