Dean Kent (dkent@realworldtech.com) on 5/11/07 wrote:
---------------------------
>While this may be true, for some reason I am still skeptical about how important
>64-bits is for the average user. Vista is still not very widely used, and Linux
>has a very long way to go to become a major player on the desktop.

Interestingly enough, our new notebook (HP Pavilion dv9205TX) came with 64 bit Vista. I was quite surprised because nowhere in the specs or advertising did they say it would be 64 bit -- just "Vista Ultimate". It does make sense that it would because it's got 2GB of RAM and 512MB of VRAM, but it was quite a pleasant surprise nonetheless. When I realised it, the first thing I did was fire up a large project in our software that would run out of memory on a 2GB 32-bit XP box and it worked fine. :-)

If even notebooks are now shipping with 64 bit Windows then I think the percentage of users is going to climb rapidly. It doesn't have to be "important" for it to happen -- but then again, I wouldn't like to be the tech support department for a company selling PCs with 2GB of RAM and 512MB video cards and explaining to unhappy users why their software keeps complaining about running out of memory when it hasn't even used 1.5GB yet. (Virtual memory fragmentation and other issues can cause memory allocations to fail even when you theoretically have plenty of your 2GB virtual address space (not to mention physical RAM!) still available; telling users how to enable /3GB is generally not an option.)

I haven't had any problems with it so far, but then I didn't have any problems using 64 bit XP for the last year, either. I think it helps not to have any exotic hardware. My brother mentioned he had difficulty getting drivers for one of his cards under XP x64 Edition.