Windows 7 - Needs 64 Bit?
One way to read this ComputerWorld story is that Windows 7 is a resource hog:
Citing data from Devil Mountain Software's community-based Exo.performance.network (XPnet), Craig Barth, the company's chief technology officer, said that new metrics reveal an unsettling trend. On average, 86% of Windows 7 machines in the XPnet pool are regularly consuming 90%-95% of their available RAM, resulting in slow-downs as the systems were forced to increasingly turn to disk-based virtual memory to handle tasks.
A slightly different way to view it is this: Microsoft has seen the future, and it has 64 bits, not 32. Do we "need" 64 bits? Well heck, you could have asked "do we need 32 bits?" a decade or so ago, too. Microsoft would like to have Windows 7 push new hardware sales, and I think they'd be even happier if those sales were at least 64 bit ready, if not actively running 64 bit.
Comments
Re: Windows 7 - Needs 64 Bit?
[Tom Sattler] February 19, 2010 9:56:51.143
Another way to read this story is that Apple did it right and Microsoft did it wrong. Apple spent their development resources on writing the UI for OSX, and picked up an existing Operating System (BSD Unix) to use as the bones. They didn't recreate an O/S from scratch, since it had been done already, and much better than they themselves would have been able to do it. Microsoft, unfortunately, found it necessary to continue being backward-compatible with 8088 machines that run Frogger. Either that, or there's a "not invented here" mentality that pervades Redmond. Either way, Microsoft is alone in our increasingly Unix-like world.