Hi Tristan
Well said re Windriver....
Many if not all of our FIRST specific tools (ie not including the commerically available compilers / IDEs) were written significantly before Win 7 64. Some of them I suspect had pretty low level stuff in it. Just trying to get some forewarning it all works in Win 7 64 (be it current versions have been upgraded for Win 7 64 or just they plain worked without mods). So far I am hearing all of FIRST stuff does work. If I don't hear anything else to contrary, I will stay with Win 7 64 and start installing IDEs in a couple of days.... Note Microsoft specifically says on their website that "MOST programs designed for the 32bit version of Windows will work on the 64bit version of windows". The keyword is MOST (not all).
Re the recommended amount of memory: Todays (32 bit) software is incredibly disk and memory resource intensive and has a habit of spawning tons of sub processes and we all have have multiple apps etc running in different windows. Just trying to get some hint whether 2gb for everything including Win 7 could possibly not be enough. It sounds like it is. But I will know for certain later this summer when start loading it up
Thanks you guys for reminding me that one 32 bit app even when running in Win 64 environment is still limited to its 32 bit memory constraints. However if it starts spawning sub processes (each with its own address space), the sum of the memory of all the processes could quite a bit more. I have a friend with 8gb on Wind 7 64 and though he is not running anything too exotic, he does have lots of windows open and actual memory usage is amazingly (embaressessly) high (lots of caching though).