Q: I have been a subscriber for over two years now and I have of course, thousands of programs on the DVDs that have accompanied my magazines. I am close to purchasing a laptop and I am heavily leaning toward a laptop with a 32-bit operating system. However, if I were to purchase a computer loaded with Vista 64-bit, about what percentage of all those programs on the coverdiscs written for 32-bit operating systems will work on a 64-bit system? I have used many, many of the programs from the coverdisks and I would sorely hate not being able to use them if a 64 bit system will not support them.
A: The earliest personal computers operated using 8-bit bytes. In other words each unit of information, or byte, was made up of eight binary numbers, or bits, each of which can be zero or one. Each byte could therefore represent values in the range 0 to 255 — this early addressing is still used by the ASCII system to define characters. A 16-bit byte offers values from 0 to 65,535. By the time you get to the 64-bit bytes which began to appear in the 1990s, you have a value range from 0 to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615.
The advantage of having more bits in each byte is that it allows the computer to access more memory in one operation. A 32-bit machine for example can address up to 4GB of RAM. With a 64-bit system you have a theoretical maximum of 16 exibytes — since one exibyte is 2 to the power 60 this is actually more than the total amount of memory ever manufactured to date, so it’s pretty future proof.
So that’s the theory, now back to the question. Despite 64-bit versions of Windows having been around for several years now there are still very few applications developed specifically for 64-bit systems. This isn’t a problem since most 32-bit and even many 16-bit programs will run quite happily on a 64-bit version of Windows.
The biggest problem with 64-bit Windows is lack of driver support, 32-bit drivers often won’t work, though on a laptop where everything is preinstalled this will be less of a problem. Having said that, because the architecture of the hardware can handle those bigger numbers, a 64-bit machine is capable of running a 32-bit operating system faster than a 32-bit machine can. Unless you really, really want to be at the cutting edge our view would be that there’s little real advantage to opting for a 64-bit operating system at the moment.
It can be hard to track down drivers for 64-bit hardware
Originally featured in PCU111