With office PCs and laptops now frequently shipping with 3 or 4GB, or more, of RAM, and operating systems such as Windows 7, it’s starting to make sense to make inroads to using 64-bit OS’s that can make best use of this hardware.
Techy bit: Part of the reason behind the move to 64-bit computing is that 32-bit computers (the ones we’ve been using for years, since the advent of the 386), can directly address up to 4GB of RAM, and no more. The range of integer values that can be stored in 32 bits is 0 through 4,294,967,295 or −2,147,483,648 through 2,147,483,647 using two’s complement encoding. Hence, a processor with 32-bit memory addresses can directly access 4 GB ofbyte-addressable memory. In the real world, actual usable RAM can range from 3GB (due to the 3-4GB region being reserved for hardware addressing), to vastly more, with many processors employing 36-bit address space, allowing up to 64GB to be addressed in a 32-bit environment.
Still, 64-bit computing is here to stay, and will replace 32-bit computing over the next few years. Windows server 2008, for example, is 64-bit only. In order to properly test and evaluate how Berrys can employ 64-bit clients in our infrastructure, I’ve installed 64-bit Windows 7 on a couple of machines, one of them being my main production laptop.
The first hurdle was, of course, printer drivers. Printer drivers are one of the banes of many an IT manager’s life, and we constantly strive to achieve a “monoculture” of printers to cut down on driver issues. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy, so most businesses will have quite a few different makes and models of printer. 32-bit and 64-bit drivers are not interchangeable – i.e. a 32-bit machine cannot use a 64-bit driver, and vice-versa. We’ve got a number of HP printers, and a Xerox Workcentre 7132, among some other units at other sites. I was able to find a suitable 64-bit driver for our HP CM6040, and install it on a 32-bit print server (which is a convoluted process), but there’s no suitable driver for the Xerox, so it’s lucky that we’re getting rid of it soon. I wasn’t able to find a specific 64-bit driver for our HP 2050dn units, only the HP universal driver, so I’ve set up a 64 bit print server (virtualised) to take the strain until a solution arises. Soon, I’ll be looking for 64-bit drivers for an Olivetti MF22 as well…
The second issue I encountered was our Cisco VPN client. It turns out that the 32-bit cisco vpn client will not run on 64-bit machines, and Cisco have not released (and have no plans to release) a 64-bit version. This is pretty disappointing. Apparently Cisco want people to upgrade to their newer hardware and use the new client software supplied with it, but this seems to be the wrong way to go about it. I use Cisco hardware because it’s reliable and effective, and we upgrade due to business requirements, not because a vendor forces us to. Partly due to this limitation, we’ll soon be upgrading to a Sonicwall VPN firewall or similar, but in the interim, I’ve found an excellent VPN client by NCF, which can import the Cisco profiles too. It’s £80 per client, which is pricey, but will satisfy our requirements until we upgrade to the Sonicwall.
Thirdly, just an interesting issue with MS Office. It seems that if you install a 32-bit version of Office Pro on a 64-bit machine, it works fine, but you cannot subsequently install any 64-bit Office family programs, such as SharePoint Designer, Project, or suchlike. Not so much of a problem, and I guess it’s due to shared libraries or functions, but it’s worth knowing.
I’m sure more issues will turn up in time.
Actually, it turns out that Cisco have released a 64-bit version of their VPN client, due to the high demand. It’s only in beta at the moment, I believe.