So you decide to give the Windows7 beta a try. The first decision you have to make is, 32-bit or 64-bit?

I had no idea what to choose or how these two version are different. The same thing happened to me with Vista when I got 2 DVDs - 32-bit and the other 64 bit. Apparently this is so confusing to consumers, some of them thought they got two copies of Vista and were selling the "second" copy on eBay...

Maybe 64-bit is faster? The only thing I had heard about 64-bit was that their drivers were often buggy. As a gamer, hearing about bad drivers means sticking to 32-bit. So I did.

Only to find out this week that 32-bit Windows systems can only use 3GB of memory. Put in 4GB or 8GB, it wont matter. The system will see it but will only use 3GB. This was a "bug" in the first generation of Intel Macs but it is a permanent situation in Windows XP, Vista and Windows7.

My initial reaction was, what the hell!?!? I just wasted some money...

My second reaction was, why?

I actually found it hard to find any real explanations for this issue. My conclusion is that there are a lot of people out there with memory they arent actually using and no idea its happening.

One of the best explanations I found was here: http://members.cox.net/slatteryt/RAM.html (The HP link has a good diagram of the address map.)

Here is my take:

Computers talk in powers of 2 (that whole binary thing you never understood). A 32-bit computer means the biggest number it can hold is 2^32 or 4 GB. Every location in memory has an address, a number, so a 32-bit system should be able to access 4GB of memory.

Except that the PC is OLD, designed long before 4 GB of memory was even imaginable. The PCI bus and other hardware locations like video cards were placed in the range from 3 to 4GB, because, well, nothing else would ever need to go there.... The more memory on your video card, the more of this memory space you are using.

There is the irony. The people most likely to have extra memory and big fancy video cards and concern about drivers are the ones least able to use the 3 to 4 GB memory...

So what is the fix? The fix is moving to a 64-bit OS.

Now that the Windows7 release candidate is out, I am planning to do another clean install on my game PC (ugh), reinstall all my games on Steam, and see what happens. Hopefully that 64-bit driver problem wont be so bad.