Goodbye x64, Hello x86

I wrote a little rant back in February 2009 about my annoyance at unmanaged code. I have now made the decision to drop back down to an x86 architecture as I upgrade to Windows 7.

Whilst it's certainly quite 'cool' to say that I run a 64 bit development machine do I really need it? For servers it's a definite 'yes' - mainly for the > 4GB memory space; but for the rest of us, probably 'no'.

I don't use more than 4GB RAM and, whilst the x64 architecture is slightly better / newer / maturer than the equivalent in x86 it doesn't make a bit of difference. You might even notice a reduction in performance due to the larger memory space pointers!

Visual Studio 2010 shipped yesterday - 32 bit only. A lot of software vendors are still wedded to unmanaged code - normally 32 bit only. Even IE8 64bit seems to have issues on my machine.

My biggest driver, though, is our company VPN. The client software will not work on Windows 7 x64. We can get an upgrade, but it's gonna cost us #fail.

So, until x64 becomes mainstream and not something that I either have to wait for or pay extra for I'm back down to 32 little bits.