"Windows 7 Compatible" PCs Must Be 64-bit 440
Barence writes "Microsoft has started certifying PCs as 'compatible with Windows 7' — and is looking to avoid the mistakes that dogged the Vista-Capable scheme. Whereas Microsoft certified PCs that could only run Vista Home Basic last time around, this time PCs will have to work with all versions of Windows 7 to qualify for the sticker, including 64-bit versions of the OS. Microsoft also claims, 'products that receive the logo are checked for common issues to minimize the number of crashes, hangs, and reboots experienced by the user.'"
Windows XP Mode compatible logo needed (Score:3, Informative)
Cuz without the VT ability in the CPU, it ain't gonna work, is my understanding. A lot of companies who cheaped out and bought lower-end CPU machines are going to be unpleasantly surprised if they need this ability. :(
I know as a dev, I'm going to have to request an upgrade to a machine that's compatabile with Windows XP mode. *sigh*
Re:Then why... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Cue the Linux fanbois... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Good (Score:2, Informative)
Or MS Office 2007, AFAICT.
Drivers (Score:3, Informative)
There is plenty of old hardware out there which only has 32-bit drivers. 64-bit Windows is a pure 64-bit kernel space meaning no 32-bit code at all. So, if you have a device with 32-bit drivers, you have to use the 32-bit version.
Also there are also some apps that fall in to this category. If they have a kernel component (like a virus scanner) that has to be 64-bit. If you have an old app that you need that doesn't have a 64-bit kernel module, well again you need the 32-bit version.
Finally there are computers that are sufficiently powerful to run 7 that don't have 64-bit CPUs. Netbooks are a good example. My coworker has tested 7 on his netbook and found it to be plenty fast. However, Netbook CPUs are still 32-bit only.
So it is a compatibility thing. It isn't really for new PCs so much as old upgrade PCs. All new PCs should ship with 64-bit chips.
Re:Windows XP Mode compatible logo needed (Score:5, Informative)
If it were something like "You need a Xeon for it to work", that'd be annoying; but it wouldn't really confuse anybody. As it is, though, there are going to be a whole lot of confused people out there.
TFA is 100% Wrong! (Score:5, Informative)
The sticker in question (Windows 7 Compatible) is not intended for use on a computer -- it's intended for peripherals and add-ons. Mice, keyboards, graphics cards, network cards, routers, etc. etc.
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What the hell is wrong this site? Are the editors becoming so lazy that they don't stop for two seconds to understand the stupidity of their headlines? You would think that Win7 isn't being offered in 32-bit mode from reading it. Instead, what it means is that any device you buy with that sticker will work with 32-bit windows and 64-bit windows.
Re:Competely untrue.... (Score:5, Informative)
this time PCs will have to work with all versions of Windows 7 to qualify for the sticker
Nonsense, there are lot's of systems out there, particularly Netbooks, which will not. Certainly will not necessarily be 64-bit.
If it only ran on 64-bit-capable systems, why is there a 32-bit version of Win 7 at all?
What exactly are you not understanding? This has exactly zero to do with a machine's ability to run Windows 7. This has everything to do with whether or not the manufacturer gets to put a little sticker on the case. The lack of the sticker does not mean that the computer is not capable of running any version of Windows 7, it simply means that the computer has not been certified to run every version of Windows 7.
Re:TFA is 100% Wrong! (Score:5, Informative)
Oh - if anyone needs to hear it from the horses' mouth itself, see here [windowsteamblog.com]. To save yourself time, scroll to the bottom of the article and see the update.
Re:Never did understand... (Score:2, Informative)
Driver compatibility.
Re:Competely untrue.... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Competely untrue.... (Score:2, Informative)
Completely true!! re-read your quoted text: "this time PCs will have to work with all versions of Windows 7 to qualify for the sticker".
The last bit important - this is only about the sticker. At no point in TFA does it state Win7 will only run on 64-bit capable systems.
Re:Netbooks? (Score:3, Informative)
What about netbooks running 32-bit CPUs? Those will all be declared incompatible with Windows 7, even though 32-bit Windows 7 will run on them? I think I must be missing something.
They won't be able to use the full feature set though. A framework or library, like OpenCL, which wants to map GPU memory into the process address space will likely not be full featured on IA32. It likely won't find a large enough hole in the virtual address space to fit a 1-2GB region, or even a 512M. So the compatibility mode version of these frameworks will either exchange data using a buffered DMA model, a remapped window, or only use a small portion of video memory - say 128M. The compatibility mode versions will by necessity be limited functionality, and since much of Win7 (like OS X) leverages the GPU for processing these limitations will percolate to other parts of the system.
Re:Cue the Linux fanbois... (Score:4, Informative)
Cue the Linux fanbois... ...screaming about how Bill is abandoning their customers after YEARS of support, whilst the Penguin does the same with 2 years of a kernel release.
Note the silence of the Mac Jihad.
I guess you read the summary backwards and didn't even consider clicking on the article.
I'm no Microsoft fan (Linux purist of 6 years now) but they are merely requiring hardware makers to provide stable 32-bit and 64-bit drivers in order to get a "Works with Windows 7 Certification."
This is a good thing for every day people.
Just recently I tried to help out a friend with a Vista 64bit computer to get his Hauppauge WinTV PVR 150 [hauppauge.com] to work. Apparently it does not support any more than 3GB of RAM and is basically unusable (he has 8GB of RAM). It causes programs to crash and flat-out will not work with Pinnacle Studio 9.
Hauppauge claims it has something to do with the 64bit memory allocation or something. I can't quite remember what it was.
Maybe this will require them to revisit their drivers and make it "Just Work" like it should.
Re:Windows XP Mode compatible logo needed (Score:3, Informative)
Or if you want to delv into the open source world, check out VirtualBox [virtualbox.org]. It supports the CPU extensions if they are available, but are not required.
I use it for setting up test environments for software development under various Linux and BSD flavours on a Gentoo Linux host. Works great for me.
Re:Good (Score:3, Informative)
What are you talking about? 486s run nice and cool. You need to upgrade to at least a Pentium if you want to keep your hands warm (or fry an egg).
Re:No Linux support? (Score:5, Informative)
There is free support for Linux via the newsgroups, forums, Wiki sites, HOWTOs, Man pages, and many other things. But beware of the trolls that like to bite the n00bz and say RTFM. You need to have actually read the Linux manual before asking questions which consists of man pages.
Man ls
For example will display a man page for the "ls" command which functions like the MS-DOS "dir" command and some Linux distros will have a "dir" batch file to help DOS users adapt.
Judging from you attitude this sort of thing happened to you [wikia.com].
Re:Good (Score:4, Informative)
It may run fine, but there are interoperability problems with win64 and Outlook - serious ones.
The Exchange management applets for mailbox moves and such use mapi functions from Outlook.
Because of shitty planning, you can't run these applets on a win64 machine. You have to run them from a 32 bit machine with the tools installed.
ExMerge is only an option if you have old ansi psts - mine are all unicode.
The point is that there *still* are major issues with 64bit systems and interoperability of productivity software, not to mention hardware support.
Re:TFA is 100% Wrong! (Score:1, Informative)
Correct article and headline:
6,000 products certified so far for Windows 7 Logo Program
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/09/6000-products-certified-so-far-for-windows-7-logo-program.ars
Re:Good (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Drivers (Score:2, Informative)
My 10 year old HP LaserJet 4m works perfectly on Windows 7 x64, thank you.
Re:Cue the Linux fanbois... (Score:2, Informative)
Microsoft does not support the majority of their customers because OEM versions are supported by hardware manufacturers.
...and, AFAIK, you can't buy extended support (from Microsoft) for OEM versions and the hw manufacturers are not required to provide extended support.
so, unless you are big business, you don't have any real technical support, "pls. reinstall and call back" is the best advice you are given.
I'm getting more proffessional support for Liunux from the Linux community and from paid Linux proffessionals than you can get for Windows from anyone!
...and Linux proffessionals do not tell you that you are using wrong hardware or running the wrong kind of Linux.
Re:Good (Score:2, Informative)
Funny thing, MS said vista was the last windows to have a 32bit version back when they released it
No, actually they didn't.
Re:Never did understand... (Score:5, Informative)
That's absolute bullshit (or fud). You expressly do not have to pay Microsoft to get their approval. You just need to sign your application / device driver using a certificate from a bunch of trusted CAs.
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See here for a list of trusted CAs: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms995347.aspx [microsoft.com]
Re:Good (Score:3, Informative)
1) Gimp is not a substitute for Photoshop. It might be good enough for a lot of people, but it's missing a lot of functionality too.
2) I'm not aware of anything for linux that can even begin to pretend to do what Adobe Lightroom does.
Re:Good (Score:3, Informative)
You forgot to mention a low latency sound solution that works more or less across the board... JACK/ALSA and the like were completely hit-'n-miss when I tried 'em.
Re:Enough with the FUD already! (Score:4, Informative)
> You don't think firefox uses a huge amount of pointers?
No. Most of the data is page content in various forms and stages of processing. The pointers would only be pointing to it, and would be comparatively few in number.
> The last time I saw a comparison by someone who was advocating that 64bit was always better
> showed a 20-30% RAM increase, and then tried to pretend that "didn't matter".
Funny, I can't /find/ a decent comparison anywhere. All I see is blanket statements of "64bit is bigger", and all the examples usually only measure executable size. Yes, executable size is larger, but the reason is not obvious. If you do a size -A comparison of both, you'll see that the size increase comes entirely from the .eh_frame section, which is needed on x64 because code normally does not contain frame pointers. This section is loadable, but is not paged in unless you throw an exception (by definition, an exceptional event), or get a backtrace for debugging. The actual loaded code is 10-20% smaller for what I have tested, so what you get here is a disk size penalty (which doesn't matter because the extra data isn't read until an exception), and smaller code size in RAM (which DOES matter).
> if for some reason you can't get 8GB of RAM, then you should seriously consider only using 32bit, IMNSHO.
Man, you really need a reality check. My Linux system (x64, of course) is currently using only 308M total, with the KDE beast and whatever crap it thinks it needs, and firefox. There's absolutely no reason to require ungodly amounts of RAM for normal operation, whether on x32 or x64.