On 25/12/2010 11:59 AM, Ant wrote:
On 12/25/2010 7:36 AM PT, Ken Blake, MVP typed:

Why not upgrade to Windows 7 64-bit? What is it that you have that can't
run on it?

Several points he

1. An upgrade from 32-bit Windows to 64-bit Windows is not possible.
He would have to do a clean installation of 64-bit Windows to get
there.

2. He couldn't even upgrade to 32-bit Windows 7. An upgrade from XP to
Windows 7 is not possible, and again, he would have to do a clean
installation.

Yeah. Even if I could do an OS upgrade, it would be too messy and ugly.
Clean, from scratch, is better.

Well, that's your only choice when going from XP to 7, so your wish is
fulfilled.

3. He's presently seeing 2.5GB of his 6GB. It depends on what
applications he runs, but it would be very rare for anyone running XP
with 2.5GB to see any improvement by having more RAM available.

I just wished I could have my 512 MB back to have 3 GB. Dang hardwares
(ATI Radeon 4870 videoc card?)!

XP's handling of newer aspects of PCs is braindead, not just the extra
RAM that's now available, but also things such as IRQs. XP seems to
think it's stuck still living in a world of AT-style 16 IRQ's, in a
modern world of 1000's of available ACPI-style IRQ's. As a result far
too many IRQ's get shared between totally unrelated hardware under XP.
It becomes a nightmare pinpointing hardware errors when it happens.

Windows Vista and 7 are much closer to the way Linux handles IRQs now.
Distributes them out amongst 16,000+ IRQ ports, and only shares them if
they are really part of the same peripheral.

4. It's similarly unlikely that he would see any improvement in
performance by running Windows 7 with 6GB over Windows XP with 2.5GB.
There are, in my view, several good reasons to go to Windows 7, but
that's not one of them.

Yeah, I will just wait until I am forced. I am happy with it. Again, I
bought 6 GB because it was cheap and on sale. I didn't know the unused
RAM could not be used for other stuff like RAM drive/disk.

I will just keep the RAM for future OS'. You never know. My old XP might
commit suicide to force me to install an 64-bit OS! I only back up my
personal datas anyways. Other stuff, I don't care.

While I waited for 64-bit Windows to mature, I did have 64-bit Ubuntu
running on my system, even before I went over 4GB. I'd been running
64-bit Ubuntu since version 5.04. It was fairly mature already at that
point, and just as well supported as 32-bit Ubuntu.

Yousuf Khan