If you have been a user of the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems throughout the years, then you might have heard that you could only use up to 4GB of memory on the computer. Different computer geeks use to try to impress people by putting a lot more Ram than that on their systems. But if you had a 32 bit operating system, it did not make a difference. No matter how much memory you had, it would still only use 4GB. The computers of that era just would not go up that much. That is because the operating system was set to 32 bits. To be able to access more parts of your available memory, you needed a operating system that could go up to 64 bits. Now Windows 7 offers the opportunity to do just this. We will discuss what this means to you and how it will affect your computing experience overall.
It might help you understand why this number makes a difference to your computing experience, if you understood what exactly it is doing. We will not go to technical in our explanation, we will just go over the basics. When you start up a program on your computer, it goes from your hard drive onto your Ram, otherwise known as memory. When it is there, different parts of the data go into what is called the address. These are little slots that holds the data of your program. Each of these memory addresses is 32 bits wide. The amount of integer data that can go into one of these memory addresses comes out to be about 4,294,967,295. This is how we hit the 4GB limit in a 32 bit system. So now if we want to increase this limit, we have to increase the amount of integers that are able to go into an address space of memory. We of course, doubled it to 64 bit. A 64 bit operating system, has an almost unlimited amount of space that it can access. At least nothing in our hardware limit right now. So this is why most operating systems are slowly trying to encourage all developers who make applications, to allow them to be compatible to 64 bit computing.
Windows 7
The use of 64 bit computing also allows your operating system to do less data swapping between the memory and the hard drive. When the memory ran out of address space for a particular program, it would send the parts of the program that it was not using, back to the hard drive. It would then call it back up, if it needed it again. All of this happens while the program is active. This is why you will notice at times, a program that has been just left sitting there, will take a while to load back up. This is because it is sitting on the hard drive and not in the memory anymore. With 64 bit computing, you get less of this and your computer will seem to go faster as a result.
So if you have a choice between a 64 bit computer and a 32 bit, go with the 64 bit option. Even though a lot of programs are not compiled to run on 64 bit computers, the operating system recognizes that and will virtualize the experience and make the application think it is on a 32 bit computer.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Recently i accidentally installed 64 bit version over 32 and wanted to reinstall ,but i didn’t notice any difference.So this is right on time for me !
Oh I see…I was always confused by this, and now I know..You made it so simple for me to understand. Today I am switching to Win 7 64bit…