I knew going to XP from W2K was going to be a pain and so it is proving.
I have just purchased a new Dell machine. It has an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4000+ processor. Now, silly me, I just thought this meant I’d purchased a 64 bit machine. But it seems that things are not quite that simple. Looking at the Microsoft site and following the advice on How to determine if you are running a 32 bit or 64 bit operating system, (Start | Run winmsd.exe, look at the processor entry) and if it starts X86 you’re running a 32 bit version, I find that teh entries for both processors start with X86; hence it’s 32 bit.
How can this be? What ‘s the point of a 64 bit processor if it ain’t got a 64 bit operating system? I think I’ve interpreted MS correctly on one of its pages where it appears to say that 64 bit XP only runs on Intel Itanium processors. Is that a correct interpretation?
And if so, why the 
is Dell selling configurations with 64 bit processors? (I didn’t specify this processor – I just chose a Dimension E521 config and that’s what it has – no choice unless I wanted to upgrade to a faster(!) processor)
Also, I am failing completely to connect my GPS to my digital mapping software on this new box. It works perfectly on my old PC, so is this a manifestation of some 32/64 bit problem?
Help, please, loungers.
Silverback
copy.
