I have been playing with my home office computer. I discovered a $60.00 (yes sixty) Seagate 500 Gig SATA internal drive when I went to the computer store (dangerous place) for some CD cases. It was the Saturday after black Friday. At first I passed it up thinking, “Wow! That’s a good price,” Especially when the standard price on the box was $119.95.<\/p>\n
On the way out, I passed the display and Mr. “T” (Temptation) grabbed me and forced my hand to grab onto a 500 Gig drive box and would not permit me to let go. Oh, they also had 1Tb (Terabyte) drives for around $100 but Mr. T wasn’t that strong.<\/p>\n
A plan had actually hatched while at the back of the store looking at CD cases, to use the new drive as my “home” (C:) drive for the Vista 64 install. I had split the original 300 Gig Vista 32 bit install drive into two partitions and booted Vista 64 from the second partition which was about 100 Gigs. That worked fine but took 100 Gig away from the Vista 32 root drive.<\/p>\n
Boy, we sure do get spoiled with these large drives. I remember my first HD was 10 Megs, yes Megs! My first upgrade was to 40 Megs and I gave the 10 to a friend who had no HD…<\/em><\/p>\n I loaded the new drive in the computer case. I discovered it wasn’t formatted so it didn’t show on the first boot. No problem, I\u00a0just formatted the entire 500 Gig (less overhead) then installed Vista 64, a clean install. Then I deleted the 100 Gig Vista 64 partition on the old drive and restored the lost space back to the original Vista 32. Tools to do all this are hidden in a rather obscure location in the Vista directories in both 32 and 64 bit versions.<\/p>\n Now I have a 300 Gig boot drive for Vista 32 and a 500 Gig boot drive for Vista 64. Do I need this much space? Heck no, but who is going to buy a 100 Gig or less drive these days? Why do this? It’s for nothing but the experience.<\/p>\n I have found out that installing 32 bit software over on the 64 bit side (it still runs as 32 bit) does not seem to cause any problems with software registration. Microsoft Office 2007 installed just fine and so did its Internet registration with no hesitation. I am assuming at this point is that if there is a check of some sort, it is still seeing or reporting the same OS registration number and perhaps processor registration as it had in the 32 bit install. My Vista is the Premium edition where I received both the 32 and 64 bit editions and they both use the same registration number. (In case someone else fails at doing this…)<\/em><\/p>\n So in the real operation it is still just one computer. I cannot run both versions at the same time using dual boot. Yes, there are other ways for dual operation but that is not the point here. So the only thing that is changing is the internal bit width of the processor and OS. In my mind this can in no way violate the intent of software copyrights. This is a great way to really compare the advantage or disadvantage or running exactly the same software in either a 32 or 64 bit OS.<\/p>\n For the record, I see no immediate advantage to simply switch 32 bit software to a 64 bit OS. My old SCSI card is not and will never be 64 bit compliant. Bummer, it runs my old scanner. So it will have to live in a 32 bit only OS. (New scanners are usually USB or equivalent, no problem.)<\/p>\n My quest is to determine the limitations of 32 bit software in a 64 bit OS. I have heard of some quirks but have no idea if they are the show stoppers hiding in the wings. Right now I have no show stoppers (like the scanner) as I can always go to either OS. I have the best and worst of both worlds for the price of a $60 hard drive which really wasn’t necessary<\/em>.<\/p>\n My cutting edge vision as the next edition upgrade is (at least) a quad processor 64 bit machine though it presently would be a total waste of hard earned cash. I just built a 64 bit 2.6 MHz dual processor box running at 32 bit for UNDER $260 and even with a new HD would be no more than $300 (less the OS, keyboard, mouse, and monitor.)<\/p>\n For this investment of mostly my time, I will have personal, firsthand knowledge if my 32 bit user world is ready for 64 bit enabled computers. Stay tuned… I’ll surely let you know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have been playing with my home office computer. I discovered a $60.00 (yes sixty) Seagate 500 Gig SATA internal drive when I went to the computer store (dangerous place) for some CD cases. It was the Saturday after black Friday. At first I passed it up thinking, “Wow! That’s a good price,” Especially when the standard price on the box was $119.95. On the way out, I passed the display and Mr. “T” (Temptation)...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[28],"class_list":["post-834","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computersoftware","tag-computer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/834","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=834"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/834\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ramblindan.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}