Tuesday, November 17, 2009

64 bit Windows 7

Windows 7. I've felt guilty about how much I like the product. I've sold my soul to Microsoft over the years, but I'd always held out something like disdain for the suite of products, feeling like my becoming a prostitute for Microsoft was a merely pragmatic decision.

Sure, I've loved C# and much of the Dotnet universe, but the operating systems were just a means to an end. I looked at the Mac operating systems since the olden days, and something there felt soft and fluffy, not like a real tool built for real work, other than artsy stuff.

Then Windows 7 comes along, and I feel guilty for my giddiness. You're not supposed to love an operating system! Get back to work dammit! But the love is there, and it has grown since I started using it when the Beta came out this spring.

I'm running Win7 Ultimate 64 bit on a dual core 2.8 GHz CPU with 4 GB of RAM. Who cares right? Those numbers aren't anything special. But last night, working late, I was tearing my hair out because converting video from AVCHD format to standard SD DVD using Sony Picture Utility was taking absolutely forever on my fairly beefy home machine running XP. Desperate, I installed the software on my laptop to see how it and Win7 would fare.

What did I find? Well it still takes about 45 minutes to convert an hour of video, but the great thing about the Win7 experience was that both cores were fully lit up. It felt like magic. On my XP box, only one core took the conversion thread and only one core was maxed out. But good old 64 bit Win7 used the whole chip, and I was delighted.

Today though, I thought to myself, isn't this what Mac users have had for years?

No comments:

Post a Comment