[kwlug-disc] upgrading hardware/64bit OS

[Khalid Baheyeldin]

On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 10:43 AM, Insurance Squared Inc. <
gcooke at insurancesquared.com> wrote:

> My wife is running Mandriva(32bit) on her business computer with a couple
> of gigs of ram.  Everything runs fine except her windows bookkeeping app.
>  I've got virtualbox installed to run windows and it's just slow -  slow
> enough that she mentions it.
>
> My thinking is that she needs more RAM.  To get more RAM, she really needs
> a 64 bit OS.  For a 64 bit OS, I need a machine that has a processor that
> will work with that (is that correct?  I've tried to install mandriva 64bit
> before on other machines and it objected because the hardware wasn't 64
> bit).
>
> Am I on the right track here?


Certain things will be faster on 64-bit. I saw benchmarks for web
applications using Apache that were noticeably faster on 64-bit than on
32-bit on the same hardware.


> Upgrade her hardware to a new processor with lots of RAM, then upgrade the
> OS to take advantage of the RAM, then virtualbox will run faster?


I can't say for sure. Perhaps.

The part that concerns me is how you can upgrade from 32 to 64 without a
reinstall.

If so, what kind of hardware should I be looking at, processor-wise and how
> much ram would you get?
>

Use a bootable CD distro (any distro will do). Drop to a shell, then run:

cat /proc/cpuinfo

Look at the "flags" line. If you have "lm", then it is Long Mode, meaning it
is 64 bits.
-- 
Khalid M. Baheyeldin
2bits.com, Inc.
http://2bits.com
Drupal optimization, development, customization and consulting.
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. --  Edsger W.Dijkstra
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. --   Leonardo da Vinci
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