Hello all (Andrew),
Brain Smith defered to Andrew on the hardware techy stuff when I asked about his transition from 32 bit to 64 bit. I tried to search for a post addressing this but 32 bit 64 bit yielded no results. Perhaps the search words are too short. Anyway here is my situation.
I am a landscape architect who has had interest in 3d for awhile and am just now acting on it. A few years ago, anticipating moving forward with that, I purchase a few used workstation computers (laptop and desktop) that had open gl graphics cards as that seemed to be important. They also are running 32 XP pro as that seemed to be the Windows OS to have for these programs. The whole 32 bit vs 64 bit issue went over my head for some reason. I have downloaded student versions of 3ds Max 2011, AutoCAD 2011, Mudbox 2011, Sketchbook Pro, Sketchup 8 (free) in order to learn the programs and see if I enjoy it as much as I think I will. I download the software onto my laptop for portability. My laptop specs are:
Dell M4400 Laptop Workstation
Precision Mobile Workstation M4400 Laptop: IntelCore 2 Duo P8400 (2.26GHz, 3M L2 Cache, 1066MHz FSB)
160 GB Free Fall Sensor Hard Drive (7200RPM)
8X DVD +/- RW w/dbl layer write capability
4 GB DDR2 SDRAM 800MHz (2 DIMMs)
15.4 inch UltraSharp WUXGA (1920x1200) CCFLLaptop Screen
512MB NVIDIA Quadro FX 770M
Genuine Windows XP Pro
My questions are these: 1) Before I go any further, should I switch to a 64 bit operating system so that I can take advantage of adding more memory (8mb in the laptop...more in the workstation), or (since I am just learning all of this software) simply stay with 32 bit until I decide it's for me (e.g. Most tutorials and projects will work fine on 32 bit with 4 gb memory?
2) If going to 64 bit is the suggestion, a) which version of Windows 7 64 would you recommend loading? b) Do you have a primer on actually making the switch (how to do it technically and what to do with old files, can files created in 32 bit be read in 64 bit etc.)
3) I'm assuming all of the bugs, incompatibilities etc have been worked out of 64 bit by this time?
4)Another reason for the switch was that if I ended up using some of these current systems as part of a render farm in the future, my understanding is files created in 64 bit must be rendered in 64 bit and same goes for 32 bit (all systems from the modeler to renderer to renderers outsourced by Backburner must be either 32 or 64 bit)?
If anyone has links to a thread where this has all been hashed out before, that would be great too. Thanks in advance.
Best,
David
