In my travels I run into lots of people who are running Microsoft Office 2010 but many of them are also running the 64 bit version. I thought I’d do a quick post to discourage this behaviour!

Yes, we’ve had it drilled into us that 64 bit is the future, and, for operating system installs you do indeed want to be running Windows x64 because you’ve probably got more than 4GB of RAM in your machine. However, when it comes to applications that have been specifically compiled for 64 bit I suggest a much greater degree of caution and reflection before diving in. It is basically a trade-off by way of sacrificing raw performance for the ability to use more RAM in that application process. What do I mean by this; Well, there is an overhead in working with 64 bit pointers and this will mean that you take a performance hit in running the 64 bit application- see this article for some simple benchmarks http://www.osnews.com/story/5768. The flip side, however,is that you can then work with a full 64 bit address space and thus your application can use more than 4GB(ish) of RAM.

So, why do I want to discourage you from installing 64 bit office?  

1. You probably don’t need that much RAM for a individual Office application.
   Unless you are working with extremely large spread sheets in Microsoft Excel it is unlikely you’ll need to use > a couple of GB of ram for a single Office App.
2. There will be a performance hit.
3. There are significant compatibility issues
   If you use Office add-ins and other 3rd party extensions you’ll find that compatibility with x64 Office is patchy at best.

So there you have it. The typical person I se running 64 bit office is the ‘IT Guy’ or enthusiast for whom more bits == more power. This just ain’t the case.

Here is the official Microsoft article on the situation: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee681792.aspx

Today is rebuild day for my primary machine, a Lenovo x61t. Moving to Win7 RTM and Office 2010 Tech Preview.

First up is pulling all the Data off my C drive.

This mainly means the data out of my profile folder. A key thing to remember here is to check your filesystem Virtualization folders for stuff that’s been put there by poorly written software. I usually backup to a hard drive but today I’m going to just push it across to my D drive partition- I made the decision last build to run two partitions again which is a move I’m pleased with.

Then it’s time to do an audit of the Program Files folder to determine which of the crap that I’ve installed over the past 7 months I actually need to install again. here is my list, not necessarily in order. Hopefully it might give readers a few pointers.

Polar Pro Trainer
WKO+
Lightroom
Life Cam
Intelli Point
WinRAR
7-Zip
iTunes
Live Mesh
Office 2010
VS2k8 + SPs
Expression Studio 3
Twhirl/Tweetdeck
Star Alliance Travel Desk
IIS + other goodies via Web Platform Installer
SQL 2k8 inc Books online
DevExpress Controls + Addins
Azure SDK
.NET Services SDK
Process Explorer
Sony Vegas
TortoiseSVN
Live Writer/Messenger
eTrust + RAS Bits
K-Lite Codec Pack
Zoom H Series Driver
SnagIt
Camtasia

So I spent an utterly infuriating night last night tracking down what seemed to be a case of missing drivers for my RAID adapter. I was trying to install Win7 and it wasn’t detecting my drive and none of the drivers I tried (from all over the web) would work. I spent some hours banging my head against the wall.

In the end, as a final attempt at resolution I tried installing from a USB thumb drive. Turns out I had mis-burnt my Win7 ISO despite using the same USB CD Drive to burn as I was using to install. Given that a 4GB USB thumb drive can be had for basically nothing these days. Given that a USB thumb drive install is oodles of times faster. Given that I wasted a good $500 of my time last night.

You’d be a mug not to follow these instructions and install from a thumb drive!

http://www.crunchgear.com/2009/01/21/seven-steps-to-a-bootable-windows-7-thumb-drive/

I have had similar issues with Vista installs where it silently or obscurely fails based on the ‘quality’ of the DVD burn. And before you ask I use branded media.

So I’ve ‘gone native’ with Windows 7 and it’s now my primary OS.

If you want the answer without reading all the crap I went through- scroll down to the heading.

I got my Thinkpad x61t up and running with most of the drivers just using the Lenovo Updater utility.

The ones I’ve struggled with are the UMTS Cellular card and my fingerprint scanner. This post is about how I solved the UMTS card issue.

1. Unpack the MSI file you download from Lenovo at C:\DRIVERS\WIN\WWANUMTS\Driver\MC877xx.msi by using something like
   msiexec /a MC87xx.msi /qb TARGETDIR="c:\temp"
2. Ensure that all your other drivers are up to date: I needed to install the various Intel AMT drivers from here first because it just wasn’t even detecting that I had a mini PCI card without these.
3. Browse to the Minicard device in Other Devices in Device Manager, right click, update driver software and browse to the Vista x64 folder that you unpacked in step one.
4. You may need to go back to Other Devices a few times to install the Modem Driver, Serial Port Driver(s) and Network Adapter Driver in that order
5. Eventually you’ll be able to open the Sierra Wireless 3G Watcher and get a signal for your carrier
   
6. From there it’s plain sailing