In our previous articles we went into the details of the advantages offered by 64-bit computers, the present state of the 64-bit architecture, as well as the prerequisites for creating a suitable environment for testing 64-bit operating systems. This latter required existing hardware 64-bit capabilities. In this article we would like to help those who wish to upgrade their existing 32-bit computers into 64-bit ones.

In the last few years, since 64-bit CPUs were released and came into use, more and more 64-bit computers have become more and more common. A large part of computers manufactured today are in fact already 64-bit regarding the hardware, they only operate in a 32-bit software environment. There may even be users who do not suspect that their computers are actually 64-bit; so before upgrading a short test is worth running. We performed the test with a software called CPU-Z to see if our system was 64-bit capable. After running CPU-Z we can see results like this:

The data in the "Instructions" line is what we are looking for: in case EM64T or AMD64 instruction sets are shown here, the computer is 64-bit and is capable of running 64-bit operating systems.