Note that the scale is logarithmic. - did you means exponential ?
for sure we need 64 bit…
I recently switched to 64bit as well, and everything just worked…well everything but Autodesk Inventor 2008. I did it mainly for the 4GB limit, since Inventor loves to suck up memory. I am forced to use that program though, I am an engineering student at OSU. On Autodesk’s website, they claim they support x64, but for me it kept crashing, and I even formatted twice. I was disappointed, there is one program that has to dictate which version of Windows I use. Their support was a joke too, they claimed my drivers were outdated.
Ehh I’ve been on 64-bit desktops at home and at work for more than half a year now. I don’t know how many times I’ve run out of resources in 32-bit world – literally, context menus would refuse to show, Internet Explorer wouldn’t render, I’d have to reboot just to function. With a full 4GB of RAM I can use virtual machines and develop in them, with full-blown SQL Server, Visual Studio 2008, and more, all tucked into a nice little VMWare instance.
While it’s great that computers are getting rediculously cheap ($200 for a Linux-installed Acer laptop now), I’m of the mindset that the budget for a professional software developer SHOULD NOT DECREASE over time, rather the power and productivity of the workstation should constantly increase.
You simply cannot increase productivity on a halfway decent workstation by sticking to the 32-bit routine. Using 32-bit Windows these days feels like Windows 95 felt when I switched to Windows NT 4. The 32-bit environment is unstable because, as I said, I’m constantly running out of resources. Besides the fact that I have a lot of essential “trash and trinkets” on my machine like SQL Prompt, WindowBlinds, daemon tools, etc., at the end of the day it usually takes me five minutes to close out of all the apps I had open as I was working with them all at the same time – web browsers, multiple Visual Studio instances (different and isolated but cooperative or interoperating software projects), SQL Server Management Studio, MS Outlook, and more. Just imagining the installation of VMWare on top of all that on a 32-bit operating system makes me shudder.
@ulric,
I don’t know how many times I’ve run out of resources in 32-bit
world – literally, context menus would refuse to show,
Internet Explorer wouldn’t render, I’d have to reboot just to function.
This is not a 32-bit vs 64-bit issue. You were just running out of
space on a table called The Desktop Heap, which you can tweak in
the registry. It’s a fixed size table of handles in Windows
http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=238pgno=1
That’s helpful, but I was aware of the difference between the desktop heap and RAM/bits.
The difference is that by default the Desktop Heap in Vista x86 is lower (shared heap size = 1024, interactive heap size = 3072, non-interactive heap size = 512) than in Vista x64 (shared heap = 1024, interactive heap size = 20480, and non-interactive heap size = 768).
So although tweakable, I’d say that that is most definitely an x86 vs x64 issue.
Jon