Thread: Installing PRS-505 Software on Vista64
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Old 10-12-2007, 10:31 AM   #33
Xenophon
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Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT View Post
There's a heck of a lot of legacy software and hardware out there. Making as much as possible of that run unchanged on Vista is clearly a key commercial requirement.

Vista 64 was never meant for the mass market, and hence could afford to be rather more "radical".
Of course it is perfectly possible to make an operating system that supports simultaneous 32 and 64 bit operation. Even in drivers. This has been true in Mac OS 10.4 for a couple of years now. (The only parts that AREN'T 64-bit ready in 10.4 are the layers above the Unix part of the OS. Those'll be 64-bit in 10.5 later this month.) 32-bit and 64-bit applications and drivers run just fine in both versions (not counting the GUI on 10.4, that is).

Microsoft certainly could have done the same (at some unknown cost), but chose not to. Perhaps it was too expensive to do, or didn't fit their marketing plans, or...

Xenophon

P.S. Note that I am not saying that MickeySoft is stupid. I'm pretty sure that they have a good reason for the various decisions that they make. And I know they have a ton of smart people. Rather, they chose their particular path for reasons that I don't understand.
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