[ThievingSix]

Just because requirements went up doesn't mean it's more of a resource hog. Go dual boot Win7 and Vista to see =).

32bit and 64bit refers to the amount of RAM the computer can address.

The limit of RAM on 32bit machines is 4gb. The rest is ignored. The reason why is simple:

On the computer an address has a structure like this 00000000. This number points to a section of the RAM. Now 32bits is 4 bytes. Each byte is 2 digits. Hence the 8 digits. Now since the computers use HEX(base 16) each digit can be an F which is equal to our base 10 number 16.

Now FFFFFFFF is equal to 4294967295 bytes. Which just so happens to be 4gb.

64bit systems can reference 8 bytes or 18446744073709551615 bytes. Which makes the new limit on RAM really really big.


Basically, computers with less than 4gb ram are 32 bit, more than 4gb ram 64bit.

And yes, the Core i7 is awsome.