Thread: Windows 7 - 32 or 64 bit ?
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Old 09-03-2014, 00:49   #20
Matth
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Re: Windows 7 - 32 or 64 bit ?
For some old devices (like my scanner) there are 32 bit Windows 7 drivers available but not 64 bit.

One other issue with 32 / 64, other than physical RAM support, is virtual space. Some things suffer from the 2GB private / 2GB system virtual split, and large address aware 32 bit software can use a full 4GB private virtual space while running on 64 bit Windows - in 32 bit, you can shift the boundaries (a bit like the old /3GB switch), but there are limits to how far you can slice down the system space.

The virtual space limit can hit system running as low as 2GB physical RAM - maybe less, but the performance would be dragging due to excessive swapping before the limit hit.
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