[citation][nom]belardo[/nom]There are some cost and performance advantages of 32bit. Win7 isn't the memory hog of vista, so for most people - 64bit and 5+ GB of RAM is severe overkill. Yes 8GB of RAM costs about $30~40 nowadays... but most people won't and don't user it. I do web work, video encoding, photoshop, etc a lot of it at the same time and my Win7 systems very rarely ever runs out of RAM. Only Supreme Commander can wipe out my 4GB on large maps. I'll admit that when I upgrade to Ivy Bridge from my old Core2 - I will most likely go 64bit Win7 with no hurry to move to Win8. But I will be sticking Win8 Preview on one of my test systems and see how it runs... so I may change my mind later... perhaps upgrading later and using Win8Beta. (I used Win7beta as my main OS for months after RTM)There are still some devices, odd-ball stuff out there that DOES NOT work with 64bit OS. Some older games totally bomb with 64bit as well.[/citation]
for me, the standard install of win 7 was 2gb on startup... i didn't reconfigure anything, but if it can get down to my xp which started up at 250-350mb that would help allot, as im constantly hitting the 7.8gb range, and programs do not like that at all.
[citation][nom]freggo[/nom]Not a question of MB savings; also M& is of course the King of bloatware.But why should I install Media Player and Internet Explorer and Office Trial Promo and Outlook and Screen savers and Games etc. and than later painfully remove them one by one; only to wonder how many DLLs have not been removed and are now sitting around doing nothing - or worse- will be found out to be a perfect backdoor for a hacker.[/citation]
or if you want a really lean install for a boot ssd i can honestly see installing windows to its own drive, mainly due to the whole nature of an os croupting itself randomly (hal.dll killed my xp install i think 3 times) or the os just needs a format and you dont want to deal with a full data wipe too.
if i could have trimmed everything i dont use out of windows 7 when i installed it i would have, i only have 120gb of space and dont want to ever go over 75% drive use on 120gb ssd.
[citation][nom]64bitEnterprise[/nom]enterprise really needs to make the transition to 64bit, are we truly going to try and hold onto 32bit application for another 10 years, if the application will never see 64bit then it's time to initiate a migration to an application that does, if you really need to hold onto your 32bit applications for a little bit longer stick them into a virtual machine running XP, of all places i think the enterprise will reap the benefits of a 64bit OS[/citation]
lets assume that its time to move on, most professional software i find is in the 1000$ per machine license, if not more, and depending on the size of the company the transition could take months, cost millions and so forth, or, make a 32 bit version of the os, something you know will at least play nice with the software, so you can buy something new if necessary and not have to build yourself an old rig.
[citation][nom]DeviceFragmentation[/nom]@matt_band i would love to agree with you but for one thing, netbooks/netops...... the definition of the PC has significantly changed since the windows98 days, the depth and breadth of devices are now pretty amazing, devices like the raspberry pi, it does not makes sense to pay half to a third the price of the device just for the OS[/citation]
most people hold onto an os till the computer breaks, or cant be fixed any more. in most cases its
2 years you can upgrade
4 years you should upgrade
6 years+ the pc is borderline useless (this was the case till dual and quad came around at least)
lets assume people upgrade 5 years later, the most important part of the computer, besides the psu, and hardware, is the os. 200~ ish for the os isnt an unreasonable price, for full os 400+... now that is unreasonable. the full os should only be about 300$, 200 if you are getting it oem.