Compatibility of old(ish) Software with Windows 7

[Davis, David]

Robert, 
You don't say what benchmarking method you used to compare 64 bit and 32 bit Windows - 
Generally, it will only manifest itself where one program (or a combination of programs) want to access more than 2GB of RAM in one go - 
it's always going to be faster to talk to RAM than to page things on and off the pagefile.sys on your hard drive.

I can't vouch for the ability of any modern OS to run "ancient DOS apps", but in general I tend to find it's a risky strategy to use obsolete software for things that you rely on to get your work done.
There'll be no vendor support.  


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Message: 2
Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2014 10:02:18 -0800
From: Robert Lauriston <robert at lauriston.com>
To: "Davis, David" <David.Davis at invensys.com>,
	"framers at lists.frameusers.com" <framers at lists.frameusers.com>
Subject: Re: Compatibility of old(ish) Software with Windows 7
Message-ID:
	<CAN3Yy4AaZJqgVO3+rhRBvVwdWwofOfnpGhwiHAphCvnNNccfeg at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

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.


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