On Wednesday, February 12, 2014 20:23:53 Kagamin wrote: > On Sunday, 9 February 2014 at 21:12:57 UTC, Jonathan M Davis > > wrote: > > And you get more memory out of > > the deal even if you have as little as 4GB in the box. I wish > > that everything > > would move to 64-bit so that we wouldn't have to even worry > > about 32-bit > > anymore. > > What's the advantage of having 64-bit OS on 4gb RAM?
Being able to actually use all of it. IIRC, the most that you can actually use with a 32-bit OS is more like 3.6GB. > The fact is cheap configurations became available for a wider > userbase with smaller income, who wouldn't think to buy a > notebook not so long ago. And you sure can't persuade them to > spend more money, 32-bit OS works and once installed it will run > long (you don't upgrade notebooks), as long as it works, there's > no reason to fix it. Except that there's no reason to put a 32-bit OS on the machine in the first place. Sure, most folks will use whatever OS was on the box, and for some reason, Microsoft continues to sell 32-bit versions of its OS, but AFAIK, there's no real advantage to running a 32-bit OS on a 64-bit processor - only disadvantages. Maybe there's a good reason for it that I'm not aware of, but as far as I can see, there's no reason for Microsoft to even be selling a 32- bit version of their OS anymore, since 32-bit programs will run on the 64-bit version, and 32-bit x86 chips aren't produced anymore. They've all been 64-bit for years now. So, even if someone has a lower end machine that has less than 4GB, I see no reason to run a 32-bit OS on it. And I would have thought that 4GB would be pretty low end at this point anyway. - Jonathan M Davis