Windows Activation

[dedndave]

i7 quad, win 7-64 - Hutch's machine sounds pretty good

not sure i want 64-bit win7   :P
i suppose, if i were buying a new machine, i would get it just to tinker with 64-bit code a little
certainly, any machine you buy nowdays is likely to be 64-bit
not sure how well 32-bit win7 flies on them

there are several editions of win7
i think i would try to avoid the "home" editions and get something called "premium" or "ultimate"
XP home editions were somewhat handicapped - it may not be so bad for win7

sinsi is probably a good guy to talk to if you want to roll your own (he's a gamer   :P )
get a m/b that you can upgrade in steps, as desired
add more RAM - later
upgrade video - later, if desired
add a RAID card - later, if desired
that way, you don't have to fork out too much cash up front
you can spend money on the m/b, CPU, and OS, for now

[sinsi]

All you need for a decent transplant is a motherboard with usb3/sata3 ($90), 8GB DDR3 ($50) and nowadays some sort of i5/i7 ($100+), AMD are cheaper but for a dev box intel have better SSEx support.
Gaming machine? Same cheap mobo/ram/hdd, expensive vga/psu.
I bought win7 pro oem for $99, so even though I have complained it has survived 2x reinstalls, new video cards, more ram...

32-bit programs run as well if not better under win64, I think because the address space isn't as crowded - a lot of 32-bit dlls seem to be just stubs, so less memory used.
There is still the 4GB limit but a 64-bit OS can give more physical RAM to more 32-bit processes, assuming the RAM is there (mine has 16GB at the moment).

[hutch--]

Dave,

I think you can do a much better price in the US, I got ripped off by Microsoft OZ to the tune of $407.00 AUD but the version to have is the black box Ultimate edition that is NOT an OEM version. RE the hardware, when I bought the i7 quad, I just picked the price point which at the time was a 2.93 gig i7 where the slightly faster ones were over a grand each. Put it into a Gigabyte P55A-UD3 board with a good quality power supply with 8 gig of memory, should buy 16 gig while the price is down but I cannot be bothered at the moment.

This Core2 quad I develop on is a faultless machine and I own a mountain of software that runs perfectly on it so I am in no hurry to use the 64 bit OS box.

[clive]

Dave,

There is plenty of crippled crap out there that still runs 32-bit, or lacks hardware virtualization, Intel is known for selling a wide array of chip variants with a mismash of features enabled/disabled to provide pricing stratification. Most Atom implementations are sold as 1GB 32-bit platforms. Most AMD platforms in last several years support virtualization and 64-bit.

While Win 7 32-bit is probably becoming far less prevalent I'd certainly check what was being sold, as you can't really upgrade 32-bit to 64-bit after the fact without a reinstall, or at least that's how I understand the "Ultimate" version. Machines sold with 3.00-3.99GB, or less, are likely to be 32-bit.

The biggest problem with Win7 is that it doesn't want to run old 16-bit code, but at least with Win 7 Professional you can get a free download of Microsoft's Virtual PC, which includes XP you can run in a box. Personally I prefer VirtualBox, but to each their own. This can be a bit of a bugger if you have to maintain some old code, or systems, using vintage compilers/tools. If you have the sources in a HLL, a quick recompile, and bug fix, is usually all that is required.