Ask Ars was one of the first features of the newly born Ars Technica back in 1998. And now, as then, it's all about your questions and our community's answers. Each week, we'll dig into our bag of questions, answer a few based on our own know-how, and then we'll turn to the community for your take. To submit your own question, see our helpful tips page.

Every computer processor has a data bus that has one line for each bit in the data word. The most common processors in personal computers handle either 32- or 64-bit words at a time. A program (be it an operating system or a user application) written and compiled for a 64-bit system will not run on a 32-bit system.

YouTube - Build 4tH app under 64bit with 4tH32 and run it in 32bit PC

Some time ago we mgirated a client site from windows server 2003 32bit servers with SharePoint 2007 to Server 2008 R2 with SharePoint 2007 and everything looked fine but ofcourse there was functionality what wasn’t tested thoroughly. This blog is about 1 of the issues we found which started with a missing DLL and later became a 32bit/64bit issue. So it all started with:

Jvness asked the Windows forum about upgrading an older, 32-bit version of Windows to 64-bit Windows 7. There are two questions you have to answer. First, is your PC compatible with Windows 7 (and that includes your peripherals and your programs)? Second, does it have a 64-bit processor?

Since I’ve written about how much faster 32-bit Internet Explorer (IE) 9 is than 64-bit IE 9, and all other browsers, on Windows 7, I’ve been buried by people running 64-bit Windows, and one poor soul who was still running 64-bit Vista, wanting to know how to install 32-bit IE 9 on their 64-bit Windows 7 systems. It’s actually both quite easy and a bit confusing, so here’s how to do it and a little of the back story.

Older Core 2 Duo MacBook and MacBook Pros from late 2008 may support 8 GB of RAM, according to hardware parts vendor Other World Computer. Other World Computer discovered that a newer version of the EFI, when combined with an updated Boot ROM, would let the computer use the full 8 GB of RAM without slowdowns or crashes. EFI is the Mac equivalent of the BIOS firmware on IBM PCs.

Have an Open Labs Gen 4 (Timbaland) or Gen unit and thinking about upgrading it to Gen6? This video covers the details!

I recently migrated to the 64bit edition of Microsoft Office 2010. My main reason for doing this was that I wanted to make use of the RAM in my machine with PowerPivot, but it certainly didn’t come without a bit of pain. The most notable parts there were that I had to convert a bunch of 32bit API calls in my VBA to 64bit compliant calls while preserving 32bit compatibility for the other machines in my office.

More and more as I've had to help support Windows 7 64-bit, I've been encountering more and more hardware that is not supported. This is partially because the move from 32-bit to 64-bit is dependent on drivers being written for the appropriate platform. And some manufacturers simply don't write any 64-bit drivers at all. I've also found that more and more, the number of 3rd party drivers that are needed to get a Windows 7 computer up and running are increasing.

This is an issue that I often get questions around and we often have cases where we have to re-capture memory dumps because the memory dumps were captured the “wrong” way. The short story is: If you are executing a 32-bit process on a 64-bit machine, (which is the default case for IIS on x64 machines for example) you need to capture the dump with a tool that allows you to create 32-bit dumps.

With the release of System Center Essentials 2010 and the general excitement around some of the new features like virtualization, some customers are asking about our upgrade/migration story from the previous version.

This article is the step-by-step process from migrating printers from Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 using the Printer Migration Wizard. If you are migrating Windows 2000 Server to Windows Server 2003, you must use Print Migrator 3.1. Print Migrator 3.1 will not work with Windows Server 2008. To migrate between Windows Server 2003 systems and Windows Server 2008 R2 x64 you must use the Print Migration Wizard.

The Microsoft Jet database engine dates back to Windows 95 or earlier and was the original underlying database engine for *.mdb files created with Microsoft Access. Versions of Jet are contained in all editions of Microsoft Windows through Windows 7 and are used by 32-bit applications to connect to Access databases contained in *.mdb files.

I have had 2 copies of Windows 7 lying around the house ever since it was released. One version is Home Premium and the other is Professional. I had been debating whether to go with a 32-bit or 64-bit install on my HTPC client and with some gentle nudges, I decided to take the plunge into the 64-bit pool. For those who aren't aware, retail copies of Windows 7 come with two DVDs and a single product key.