I want/need a new PC

[MikeDunn]

Apologies to all who don't care about this ...  Please use your 'Back' key to avoid technical corrections

The OS maybe 64 bit the Programmes are not.

Like I said - the programs don't care.  The OS divvies up the memory as & when programs request it.  All that 32-bit or 64-bit really means is the size of data the program can handle - up to 32 bits or up to 64 bits at a time.  The OS passes the data in the right format to the app. 

Have a look in your programs folder .. one will be normal one will have (x86)  after it  one is for 64 bit progs one is not..

And ?  All that means is that the OS recognises which apps are 64-bit capable and which are 32-bit, and stores them in the appropriate sub-folder.  Nothing more.

as for multi tasking , Macs do it better ( it pains me to say ) as they are built  on Unix ,,, as is Andriod etc..

Immaterial (and incorrect).  It is only since the advent of systems that have more than one physical CPU and those that have multiple CPU cores on a single physical die that multi-tasking has happened on low-end systems (PCs, Macs etc - we aren't talking about HPCs, minis or mainframes which have done this since - well, since before I was interested in computing, and thats several decades ago !).  If you have a single CPU then you do not have multi-tasking - you have time-sharing (aka time-slicing).  And there are very few apps that are multi-CPU capable.  The Windows OS has been multi-CPU capable since the NT code-base, and hence true multi-tasking; granted, you needed to use a multi-processor HAL instead of the normal one (upgrades were a right bugger  ), but it was there - back in the early 1990s !  Oh, & Macs weren't based on Unix until OS X - which was actually code originally from NeXT ...  Apple couldn't come up with a decent OS to replace what they had prior to OS X.

Windows was not designed to work the way it does today .

Rubbish.  See my comment above.

Ideally they need to scrap this current system and start again

Which they do every 8 years or so.  The current incarnation (Win8) is effectively a new GUI on top of Win7 - which in turn was a modified version of Vista.  That was the last major code-change, and saw the convergance of the home and business OS codebases from the previously seperate codebases.

how many programs are 64bit.. how many can see over 3.5 GB?

It doesn't matter !!!  All that happens is that programs unable to see 64 bits are given a 32-bit address space to use !  And while they cannot see more than 3.8GB RAM (not 3.5GB as you claim), that makes no difference - the OS gives them whatever memory they require regardless of where it is in the memory-map ... and that means that you can run as many apps as you can do in the RAM available ...

does not work like that 

As Tim says - yes it does.

Mike
(who happens to work in the industry, and holds a lot of MS certifications as well as those from other vendors)

Can we get back on-topic now, or better still - back onto N Gauge ?

[Caz]

Hey guys, cool it, no wars on here please or the thread will be locked.

[Trainfish]

I've done a bit of tidying up and it seems a lot better now so I'll stick with this PC for now 

Thanks anyway guys and gals 

[EtchedPixels]

Worth keeping your eye out for bargains at the moment. PC sales have crashed about 14% versus this quarter last year so there ought to be a lot of quite nice excess inventory around fairly soon. Especially as it will all notionally be obsolete when all the touch enabled laptops appear shortly

Alan

[MikeDunn]

Especially as it will all notionally be obsolete when all the touch enabled laptops appear shortly

They came out several years ago - & failed spectacularly.

These days, they call 'em tablets & do quite well !

[EtchedPixels]

Especially as it will all notionally be obsolete when all the touch enabled laptops appear shortly

They came out several years ago - & failed spectacularly.

These days, they call 'em tablets & do quite well !

The touch enabled laptops have keyboards. Thats the alleged distinction

[MikeDunn]

Especially as it will all notionally be obsolete when all the touch enabled laptops appear shortly

They came out several years ago - & failed spectacularly.

These days, they call 'em tablets & do quite well !

The touch enabled laptops have keyboards. Thats the alleged distinction

Actually, a number of the previous generation I refer to had keyboards; they were generally folded away under the screen, so that the footprint was screen-sized when used in touch-screen mode.