John said:
But I was hoping Microsoft would pay me, for a change.
A question for 64-bit proponents...
They are still offering a 32-bit version of Windows, why?
Unless I see a reason to go with 64-bit, I won't risk it.
If it works at least as well as XP, if Macrium Reflect can handle
it, it's a no-brainer.
Thanks.
My laptop shipped with 3GB of RAM, and had a 64 bit OS install.
It could just as easily have had a 32 bit OS installed instead,
and still been able to address all the RAM. That's one benefit of
a 64 bit OS, is the ability to handle more RAM.
The biggest speed improvement I ever got out of a 64 bit OS,
was a numeric calculation that went 1.65x what a 32 bit version
of the same program could manage. It's because the library used,
did 64 bit math calculations, instead of 32 bit ones. And instead
of doubling performance, it weighed in at 1.65x. Still not enough,
when the basic algorithm was about 1000x slower than needed.
You can run the 32 bit version just fine, subject to the Microsoft
RAM license (the 4GB limit, which is not a technical limit, but an
artificial limit).
As for Macrium Reflect, it's probably still under development, so
there'd be a version for Windows 7. But the "system image" capability
built into Windows 7 is just as good. While the OS is running,
the "system image" function can make a backup of C: as a .vhd file.
It uses VSS (volume shadow service) just like Macrium does. And a
..vhd can be mounted in a virtual machine, if you needed to access a
single file for some reason. In fact, when I want to inspect the files
on my laptop, I have a 26GB .vhd from the laptop on my WinXP machine.
And if I load that into VPC2007, I can access single files, count
the number of files, see how many files are hard linked and so on.
And it's because the .vhd is an exact copy of the original (without
sector-by-sector copying - only the busy sectors are copied). The OS
knows where all the metadata is, where the file clusters are, and
copies everything.
As far as adopting Windows 7 or Windows 8, it's all a matter
of whether the interface is to your liking. I don't particularly
like Windows 7, because of its reliance on text and typing.
The search was nasty enough, that I turned on indexing so it
would run faster. I've never enabled indexing on any other
OS. And even with the interface speeded up (for things relying
on search to work), the GUI can still be clumsy when displaying
results (generating an index, tends to create more irrelevant
search results).
To generate an index of my 26GB of content on C: in Windows 7,
takes around 3 hours. Even though I used the interface and told
the tool to *not* index file contents - all I wanted was for file
name search to work, but the indexer just ignores your request
and indexes everything anyway. If it had worked at the file level,
indexing would probably take around 2 minutes.
*******
If you wanted a reason to go 64 bit, Adobe is now making some of
their most recent tools only available in 64 bit versions. Now,
not a lot of people can afford an Adobe Suite, so this is a small
loss in terms of opportunities.
Paul
