i remember when Windows 95 came out, the miracle of 32bit computing, the number 4GBs of RAM was so huge that i never thought we would get there, why in the world would anyone want to have 4GBs of ram on a computer, seemed like infinity at the time. (Yes i know MS released 32 bit before 95 with Win32s and NT but i am talking about ordinary desktops)
Anyway, these days, when an application works 32bit only, i know in advance the application is no longer maintained, With Virtualization, Database, RamDisks and other things, 32bit is long gone (At least to me), the 2 to the power 32 = 4GB are hardly good for a modern computer with a computer geek behind it, 2 to the power 64 = , (In reality, the 52/48 bit physical address is more than enough so it is not realy 64bit). seems more like it, and seems like something that will not be obsolete in the comming 20 years (Unless new technology introduces new kinds of ram where we get ram in Terrabytes)
Anyway, Microsoft’s 32 bit emulator seems to be working fine, but not for device drivers, the reason for that is that the driver is lower than the emulator (Closer to the hardware and does not pass by the emulator), This is not a problem as far as i can see as any modern hardware supporting 64bit computing should have 64bit drivers, PCI cards that do not support 64bit are common, but then again, the 32bit drivers should work for those.
Anyway, thanks to AMD i now have a 28GB Ram Hard Disk (Virtual), and when i want to analyze Database data, disk seek time is not longer an issue to me, seek time simply does not exist in RAM.