Windows 7 32-bit or 64-bit in a Corporate Environment?

[Saint Nick]

Hello everyone, I am currently working on a project at the Union Pacific Railroad in transitioning from Windows XP to a new operating system. Right now, they are planning on going to Vista, but upper management wants to move towards 7 right now.

This question mainly pertains to 32-bit version and 64-bit version of the OS. What are the main differences that we will see aside from the allowed increase to 8GB of RAM in a workstation? A lot of our applications are 32-bit and made in-house. Some of our apps are even *GASP* 16-bit . Are we going to run into any problems by choosing a 64-bit OS over the 32-bit? What types of things do we need to look out for?

 

[Griffinhart]

16 bit apps will not run under 64 bit windows, BUT....

If your CPU supports hardware virtualization you can use the "XP Mode" that will come with Win7 Pro to run any incompatible apps.

If you don't have a supported CPU and you wish to run 64-bit, you'll probably need to run Virtual Box, Virtual PC, or VMWare and run XP in a virtual machine.

 

[Saint Nick]

Our hardware consists of new Dell Optiplex 755s with Core 2 Duo and 2GB memory, so we won't have any issues running 64-bit Windows, I'm guessing. But we want to figure out if we'll have more problems with it than 32-bit, and especially if there are any advantages to having 64-bit over the 32-bit OS.

 

[yinan]

With that hardware I do not see any advantage to going 64bit. For their older applications you may want to look into application virtualization with either Thinapp (my favorite), or APPV.

 

[RebateMonger]

If a company hasn't already moved to Vista, then it'd probably be a good idea to evaluate Windows 7. Not because W7 is "better", but because of the XP Virtualization that will likely come in handy with old applications, which many companies use.

As noted earlier, though, W7's XP virtualization isn't a universal fix. The computer running W7 has to have a CPU that includes hardware virtualzation support (VT extensions in the case of Intel CPUs). Those are NOT commonly available on today's desktop PCs. VT extensions are on maybe 1/3 of Intel's Core2 lineup (this is just a guess, nothing more).

 

[Saint Nick]

We are definitely NOT moving to Vista at this point. We spent the last two years test our software titles (somewhere around 900 total) in a Vista test environment, which has been a waste of time because we are moving to 7. We just need to know if 32-bit or 64-bit would be better for us. I personally think we wouldn't really benefit from a 64-bit environment, namely because it would cause a headache updating vendor's and third-party drivers, some software could potentially run worse, and we have ZERO need for anything more than 4GB of RAM in our workstations.

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: NightDarker
I personally think we wouldn't really benefit from a 64-bit environment, namely because it would cause a headache updating vendor's and third-party drivers, some software could potentially run worse, and we have ZERO need for anything more than 4GB of RAM in our workstations.

Sounds like it's 32-bit W7 then. If you later find that individuals or departments need 64-bit W7, it should be easy enough to implement, since you've already tested the basic OS.

 

[Scotteq]

(1) If you haven't gotten past the testing stage for a Vista Rollout, then I'd recommend swapping your test setup to 7 instead. Why? By the time you could/would get rolling, 7 will be available anyhow, and why upgrade twice?

(2) 16 bit code will not run locally on a 64 bit OS. This will need to be either (a) Virtualized using VMWare/7's Virtual XP or some other product, (b) Run on a server capable of 16 bit code and accessed remotely from a 64 bit client through some front end, (c) Or rewritten entirely.


(3) Regarding the 8GB limit you referred to: That sounds like the physical limit of the motherboard you may have access to. In terms of the software, 64 bit Windows' (artificially set) address space limits are 64GB for Vista Basic, and 128GB for all other versions. I do not know off the top of my head if Win 7 has a different configuration in this regard. On the server side, Server 2008's limit is 2TB. (The theoretical address space limit for a 64 bit OS is 16 Exibytes)


(MSDN info on address space) http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778.aspx