64 bit results

[OcciMO]

At the turn of the year my firm updated to Windows 7, but kept ACA 2009. (I have to say that ACA 2009 worked better with windows XP.)  To cut to the chase, I wanted to ask everyone who upgraded to 64bit how things were going.  How much pain was it to switch?  I'm assuming you've had to upgrade windows. printer drivers and the works.  If you are running a 64bit system, do you notice such a difference in speed that you would deem it worth it?  Does anyone have a sense of when well all be forced to go to 64bit in exchange for support and updates?

Thanks all. 

M.

[Anonymous]

Can't comment about win7 64 bit, but I've been using XP64 for a few years and haven't had any issues. Yes drivers could be a problem, along with any other software you might use that may not like the 64 bit OS. I chose the change to access more RAM for rendering. ACA is a resource hog when it comes to rendering. If you're not rendering and don't have large data sets then I'm not sure you'll see much of a differance.

If you ever plan to move to revit then 64bit is a must for large projects.

[joeldf]

Agreed.

And, you don't move to 64-bit for speed - I thought that was made clear years ago - you move there for more memory allocation (which may have only a secondary affect on speed if hard drive paging, or thrashing, is reduced). 

ACA '09 was the first version where the physical memory limitation was a problem.  As an office, we moved to XP64 a while back (we haven't moved to Win 7 yet either), and started loading up machines with 8GB.  Now I find that with Revit and these large projects, we may need to load up with 16GB.