Jumping into 64 bits

With Windows 7 RC1 released recently I thought it would be a great time to upgrade. If I am going to be on the bleeding edge I might as well go all out with the 64bit version.  I played around with the Windows 7 beta and loved the new look and feel. The new task bar took some time to get use too but overall I felt like it was a nice update. Microsoft will tell you that a bunch of code has been changed under the hood but it really goes unnoticed because the RC1 runs without a hitch. After installing on my main desktop machine I only had one crash for an unknown reason but what mac or pc has not had at least one kernel panic.

I did run into a few things I wanted to mention. I thought that everything I use daily had been released in a 64bit version.  In reality only a few very specific programs are 64bit right now.

• IE 8 is 64bit but no flash support just yet.
• Firefox is 64bit in beta, also no flash.
• JAVA is now 64bit.
• Photoshop CS4 is 64bit but I don’t believe any of the other Adobe apps are.
• None of the Office apps are 64bit.

It seems like we are one generation away from the majority of developers having 64bit version of everyday software. This really doesn’t matter because Windows will run 32bit application just fine. With some help of out-of-sight visualization things run smoothly. These 32bit application will still be confined to normal 32bit rules such as only being able to access 2GBs of ram (without some help from the developer).

What is the point of having a 64bit operating system and running the standard 2 GB of ram. So a few days ago I ordered some nice and shine 2 GB sticks of Corsair ram from Newegg. I already had two 1GB sticks and picked up two more 2GB sticks making a total of 6GBs. Why go with 6GB and not say 16GB. Well my motherboard (MSI P6N Platinum) only supports 8GB (7+GB in reality) anyway and I would only reach that number by replacing the sticks I already had. No need to replace good hardware so I only filled the available slots. If you are in the same situation make sure you find out what your motherboard supports.
The upgrade does make a different in curtain situations. Windows 64bit loves ram and therefore tries to use it very efficiently. With only some gadgets, Firefox (5 tabs) and Dreamweaver open I am using 1.5GB of memory. Earlier I was clicking a link to a help website in Dreamweaver with Firefox hidden underneath. The link appeared not to work so I clicked again. I kept clicking and then got frustrated so clicked the link several more times. Turns out that the link was opening as tabs in Firefox which was out of sight underneath Dreamweaver. When I finally figured this out I had 40 to 50 tabs open and Firefox was using over a GB of ram. This is not a real world everyday event but after closing all the tabs it really felt good to have just upgraded.

My only issue happen while installing the extra 4GB of ram. I poped the sticks into place and started it up to a very slow log-in screen. It took around 10 minutes just to get past the windows start up animation. After some looking around it turned out I needed to update my motherboard bios. There was a problem with having 4 or more GBs of ram installed. I took out some of the ram, rebooted and updated the bios. Works great now. For the record I have the MSI P6N Platinum and updated to the lastest bios. Although I beleave any version after 1.3 will work just fine.