Anyone gone 64 bit windows 7 (should i down this route)

[round2it]

just changing our teacher machines but wanted to get 64bit windows for the performance and use of ram

 

what problems have you encountered

 

we use

 

sims

office

cs5 master collection

audacity

monkeyjam

mind genius

scratch

openoffice

promethean whiteboards activstudio (possible free upgrade to inspire)

 

what gotchas should i look out for as we currently have some macs bootcamped to windows 7 32 bit and they seem quite ok

[SHimmer45]

Promethean works ok with Activeprimary, using the latest Active manager driver and works fine.

teachers need more than 4GB of ram im surprised

[AngryTechnician]

You're more likely to have problems with peripherals than software, in particular printer drivers. You'll need to have 64-bit drivers available and installed on the server for any of your shared printers you want the 64-bit clients to connect to.

 

As for your above list, Audacity, Scratch, and Office will be fine. Don't be tempted to install the 64-bit version of Office, as it won't be compatible with a lot of plugins and even Microsoft recommend against using it unless you really need it (hint: you don't). I would be very surprised if OpenOffice had any problems, and CS5 should have no fewer problems than it does with anything else

[round2it]

our printserver is windows server 2003 do i need 64bit drivers for this also

[round2it]

also the more ram the better i say as we are trying to future proof our system so was looking at i5s with 8 gig of ram as they turn out pretty cheap sub 400 mark

[RichCowell]

If you use Nova-T4 with SIMS still that's not compatible with 64 bit...

 

We've been using several for a while and the only issues we've had has been printer drivers, quite a lot of our smaller printer (that I'm trying to get shut of anyway) don't have drivers available for either Windows 7 at all, or just not 64 bit...

Edited May 2, 2012 by RichCowell

[sonofsanta]

also the more ram the better i say as we are trying to future proof our system so was looking at i5s with 8 gig of ram as they turn out pretty cheap sub 400 mark

 

What warranty are you looking at on those? Seems a good price for i5's, particularly if it's a 5 year warranty

[round2it]

3 years

 

so 32bit is the way to go i think

[Kitkatninja]

our printserver is windows server 2003 do i need 64bit drivers for this also

 

YES... The amount of problems with printing/allocating printers that we've had to sort out at different places because new printers were install with only their 32bit drivers by another person/organisation has been a bit of a headache (especially trying to find some of the drivers)...

[round2it]

i think im decided now

 

windows 7 32 bit it is

 

premier pro installed on our other machines fine with 32 os so i might get the 64bit with 32bit downgrade option

[sted]

when i started going win7 i went straight to x64 servers already were so printers is less hassle than x86.

 

sims nrmal worksations are fine

office fine but as said use x86 though ive been running x64 on my laptop and never had an issue

cs5 master collection no idea

audacity fine iirc

monkeyjam pass

mind genius pass

scratch fine but it creates a duff shortcut

openoffice fine

promethean whiteboards activstudio (possible free upgrade to inspire) no idea

[Duke5A]

i think im decided now

 

windows 7 32 bit it is

 

premier pro installed on our other machines fine with 32 os so i might get the 64bit with 32bit downgrade option

 

Anything CS5 on up in the video editing suite of programs requires a 64bit OS; this will include Premier Pro and After Effects.

 

System requirements | Adobe Premiere Pro

 

We made the switch to 64bit last school year and haven't come up across any serious issues. What you really need to do though is build an x32 and x64 image and run them side by side with your software load out before making a definite decision.

[themightymrp]

Printer drivers are the main bug-bear with 64bit. If you can get the correct ones added to your server then alls well but dont rely on the HP Universal Driver!! It really slows things down at login!

 

Also, I only install 32bit Office due to the plug-in issues. Not had a problem with anything else really, 32bit software installing into the Program Files (x86) seems to work just fine.

[scottpowers82]

We have stuck with 32-bit machines for now as only the laptops we purchased last year for some teachers had 4GB of RAM (anything we buy now has a minimum of 4GB). Most teachers have maybe 2GB on their current laptops. Also, I wanted to stick with 32-bit since some of our classrooms still use some pretty old software (mostly special ed stuff) that I never got to try out on 64 bit machines for any compatibility issues. However, I'm thinking that enough time has passed so that I will probably start switching them over next school year...

 

Round2It: What kind of machines were you looking at that have an i5 proc and 8GB for under $400...seems like a pretty good deal and we're getting ready to replace a couple labs worth of machines (maybe 60-90 machines). I have quotes from several companies on mostly Lenovos (we've had great luck with them past few years after being burned badly by MPC) and most of them (looking at All in One Thinkcentres) cost $600 - $800.

[round2it]

The 8 gig is a special deal with ac manager but the standard 4 gig is here

Fujitsu Esprimo E400 Small Form Factor PC / Intel Core i5-2320 / 4GB / 500GB / Windows 7 Professional / 3 Year Warranty Upgrade - www.misco.co.uk

 

 

 

 

 

Intel® Core™ i5-2320 - 3.00GHz Processor

4GB RAM DDR3 / 500GB Hard Disk Drive

DVD±RW (±R DL) / DVD-RAM

Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-bit (includes 32-bit recovery media)

3 Year On-site Warranty Upgrade

[synaesthesia]

We're going straight for 64bit WIndows 7 in a mass rollout this Summer. I will not succumb to installing redundant software on systems for the sake of one or two (unimportant) programs; if they don't work on 64bit systems they are a) not fit for purpose b) the programmers/publishers must be shot on sight and c) it's as bad as the Millennium Bug as far as I'm concerned. If it's 32 bit only and it's been made in the last few years, it's broken.

We will be going 32bit Office though, due to the issues outline here. Printers are already on a 2008 R2 server so have 64bit drivers sorted out already. The difficulty isn't usually in finding 64bit drivers for those, it's finding the right ones to correspond with your 32bit drivers so 2008 print server works properly

[MatthewL]

If the above post (by synaesthesia) had a like button I would click it.

 

I think the same way most stuff will work, I cannot comment on SIMS as I don't use it but I've had our stuff working, all I can say is build a machine and try it and see. You don't get anywhere if you don't try.

[synaesthesia]

For note, SIMS and FMS both appear to work fine on 64bit - tested thoroughly

[User3204]

We had a look at 64bit windows last summer, but found there were too many D&T software that were 16bit.. And they wanted to be able to use them.

 

Some of the 'older' staff have now left, so we can have another go this summer, and try to persuade them that this software is really too old to be used anymore. Trouble is, some of this software is to control the CAD/CAM machines....

[Duke5A]

We're going straight for 64bit WIndows 7 in a mass rollout this Summer. I will not succumb to installing redundant software on systems for the sake of one or two (unimportant) programs; if they don't work on 64bit systems they are a) not fit for purpose b) the programmers/publishers must be shot on sight and c) it's as bad as the Millennium Bug as far as I'm concerned. If it's 32 bit only and it's been made in the last few years, it's broken.

We will be going 32bit Office though, due to the issues outline here. Printers are already on a 2008 R2 server so have 64bit drivers sorted out already. The difficulty isn't usually in finding 64bit drivers for those, it's finding the right ones to correspond with your 32bit drivers so 2008 print server works properly

 

Truer words have never been spoken.

 

Unfortunately we're absolutely married to some really old crusty software. The funny thing is it'll run just find on an x64 system, but it's the installer that complains and won't finish. I've gotten around this by packaging it up into an MSI or Ghost AI on an x32 system and using the package on the x64 box. It's dirty, but it works for those oddball pieces of software that are used once in a century.

[gshaw]

The 8 gig is a special deal with ac manager but the standard 4 gig is here

Fujitsu Esprimo E400 Small Form Factor PC / Intel Core i5-2320 / 4GB / 500GB / Windows 7 Professional / 3 Year Warranty Upgrade - www.misco.co.uk

 

Intel® Core™ i5-2320 - 3.00GHz Processor

4GB RAM DDR3 / 500GB Hard Disk Drive

DVD±RW (±R DL) / DVD-RAM

Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-bit (includes 32-bit recovery media)

3 Year On-site Warranty Upgrade

 

Nice, shame they're all in desktop form as I need towers for the rooms we're doing at the moment.

 

Anyone using Fujitsu kit? Never really heard much about them in for use in education, build quality and warranty response are the bits I'm interested in (and importantly whether they use Intel NICs as pretty much any other network card manufacturer tends to have awful drivers)

[FragglePete]

We're looking at this ourselves at the moment, and I'm testing a 64Bit image at present.

 

Biggest problem so far has been older software. And also, we use CSE to build the Start Menu with all the Shortcuts pointing to c:\program files\, but of course software gets installed into c:\program files (x86)\ so the links don't work. The prism packager is being clever by installing software into the right location but CSE Client isnt. The option is to create different set of icons for either 32bit or 64bit.

 

I may roll out just one area with 64Bit during the Summer which is getting the new kit and see how it goes.

 

Pete

[SYNACK]

We only had three bits of software that choked on 64bit all of which had upgrades impressivly. http://www.edugeek.net/forums/educational-software/93933-commendable-software-support-greygum-software.html

 

64bit is definatly the way foward and you should look to move now and get the little issues out of the way while there are still multiple paths and solutions rather than being forced into it all at once with the next versions. By going with the tech each upgrade we have managed to purge/upgrade most of the software titles as we went so we only dropped one or two at a time rather than a whole stak at once.

[Rozzer]

Just went 64 bit and only hit three applications with issues. Micro smile which you can no longer buy as its 16bit and novat4 and some mfl program. Otherwise it's been fine. I setup a wmi query to change start menu if it's 64bit.

[bossman]

@Rozzer:

If you thinking of future proofing you could also take a look at this:UEFI - Home

 

This is what I would be looking at if I was purchasing new clients, this along with Windows 8 will keep the boot process down to a couple of seconds instead of 1 minute plus depending on your hardware.

 

This plus 64 bit clients is what I will be looking at for the forseeable future along with new server OS, the future with Microsoft looks bright........very bright indeed.