Everything on my PC is 32bit. Why?

[Time2Kill1]

I recently bought new PC not to long ago. And i have just noticed that everything installed on it is in 32bit why is this and how do i change everything to 64bit? I am not PC savvy in the least. Is everything supposed to be 32bit?

Specs:Windows 8.1 64-bit
CPU Intel Core i5 4460 @ 3.20GHz
RAM 8.00GB Dual-Channel DDR3
Graphics 2047MB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960

 

[Dunlop0078]

A lot of programs are still 32bit. Go into your c drive everything in Program files(x86) should be 32bit and everything in Program Files should be 64bit.

My chrome is also 32bit and so is my nvidia backend. Your task manger looks just like mine im on a 64bit win 10 system. I dont think their is any issue.

 

[Calculagator]

This is perfectly normal. Most applications don't need to be and are not 64 bit.

 

[Time2Kill1]

A lot of programs are still 32bit. Go into your c drive everything in Program files(x86) should be 32bit and everything in Program Files should be 64bit.

My chrome is also 32bit and so is my nvidia backend. Your task manger looks just like mine im on a 64bit win 10 system. I dont think their is any issue.

AHh ok. Well my main concern was Diablo 3. I wanted to run D3 in 64bit. any idea how to do that? There is not option for it in the bnet app.

 

[wpgwpg]

If an application doesn't need to address more than 4,000,000,000 bytes, there's no need for it to be 64 bit. That is the case with most applications I've seen. The main reason we have 64 bit Windows is so we can run multiple applications that total up to more then 4 GB.

 

[Dunlop0078]

A lot of programs are still 32bit. Go into your c drive everything in Program files(x86) should be 32bit and everything in Program Files should be 64bit.

My chrome is also 32bit and so is my nvidia backend. Your task manger looks just like mine im on a 64bit win 10 system. I dont think their is any issue.

AHh ok. Well my main concern was Diablo 3. I wanted to run D3 in 64bit. any idea how to do that? There is not option for it in the bnet app.

Diablo 3 is not a 64bit application I dont believe it has a 64bit version. Diablo 3 has no reason to be 64bit its not using enough memory to require it.

 

[Time2Kill1]

Got it. Thanks.

 

[molletts]

Most things will be 32-bit - it's normal. There is a 64-bit version of Chrome available but I'm not sure what difference it really makes for a web browser apart from using more memory. Some games also have 64-bit support; they should make use of it automatically on your system.

It's a fallacy perpetuated mainly by computer salesmen (and school ICT textbooks & teachers, at least in the UK) that "64-bit PCs are twice as fast as 32-bit ones because they process twice as much data at once".

The main benefit of 64-bit mode is the ability to access more memory at one time. 32-bit code can only "see" a maximum of 4GB at one time, kind of like looking through a small window, and has to move the "window" around to access other memory. 64-bit code has a much larger "window" to look through. Programs that don't need to access 4GB+ of RAM at one time don't really benefit from this. It used to be mainly relevant to big database servers and scientific computing applications but modern games are beginning to exploit it to allow much larger and more detailed worlds.

There are some performance benefits to be had from an AMD64 (x64) processor operating in 64-bit mode but they're mostly down to extra features that are only available to 64-bit code rather than the "bitness" (word length) itself.

Conversely, 64-bit code tends to use more memory which can harm performance in some cases (there's a special "hybrid" mode called "x32" that has been developed in the Linux world to mitigate this by allowing the extra features to be used from "pseudo-32-bit" code that doesn't need to access large amounts of memory).

[Dammit, I've been on the phone for ages. There'll be about a billion other replies by now. Oh well.]

 

[Time2Kill1]

Most things will be 32-bit - it's normal. There is a 64-bit version of Chrome available but I'm not sure what difference it really makes for a web browser apart from using more memory. Some games also have 64-bit support; they should make use of it automatically on your system.

It's a fallacy perpetuated mainly by computer salesmen (and school ICT textbooks & teachers, at least in the UK) that "64-bit PCs are twice as fast as 32-bit ones because they process twice as much data at once".

The main benefit of 64-bit mode is the ability to access more memory at one time. 32-bit code can only "see" a maximum of 4GB at one time, kind of like looking through a small window, and has to move the "window" around to access other memory. 64-bit code has a much larger "window" to look through. Programs that don't need to access 4GB+ of RAM at one time don't really benefit from this. It used to be mainly relevant to big database servers and scientific computing applications but modern games are beginning to exploit it to allow much larger and more detailed worlds.

There are some performance benefits to be had from an AMD64 (x64) processor operating in 64-bit mode but they're mostly down to extra features that are only available to 64-bit code rather than the "bitness" (word length) itself.

Conversely, 64-bit code tends to use more memory which can harm performance in some cases (there's a special "hybrid" mode called "x32" that has been developed in the Linux world to mitigate this by allowing the extra features to be used from "pseudo-32-bit" code that doesn't need to access large amounts of memory).

[Dammit, I've been on the phone for ages. There'll be about a billion other replies by now. Oh well.]

Good to know tho. Good read. thank you for taking the time.