Compatibility of old(ish) Software with Windows 7

[Robert Lauriston]

The memory limit is per process. There are various ways that 32-bit
applications that need more than 2GB of memory (which few do) can use
it in 32-bit Windows.

I worked for 18 months with 64-bit Windows 7 at work and 32-bit
Windows 7 at home. I saw no performance difference. I had both 64-bit
and 32-bit Photoshop on the work computer and the only difference I
noticed was that it took much longer for the 64-bit version to load.

The only significant difference was that I could run things at home I
could not run at work. XP Mode had problems. 32-bit Win7 can run
ancient DOS apps, 64-bit can't.

On Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 12:52 AM, Davis, David <David.Davis at invensys.com> wrote:
> Personally I wouldn't do it that way - as you then don't get the advantages 64 bit windows offers with being able to address more RAM - in 32 bit Windows you can only use a couple of GB. With a busy PC, big documents, big graphics, video etc you can easily use more than 2GB of memory.
>
> The pro editions of Windows 7 offer an "XP Mode" for running old applications (Basically it runs them inside a virtual machine of Windows XP - but transparently, once you've set it up, you just click the program's icon to launch it like any other, and it appears to be running in Windows 7, and can access your Win7 filesystem seamlessly).  I've never yet encountered an application that couldn't work in XP mode like this, even 16 bit (!) ones designed to run on Windows 3.1.

> From: Robert Lauriston <robert at lauriston.com>
> Install Windows 7 32-bit rather than 64-bit, fewer potential
> compatibility problems.