Hacker News Reader

Comment by stephengillie | Hacker News Reader

Why is there a 32bit variant of win8? Are there people who actually use win8 on non-64bit systems?

Long hardware maintenance cycles, especially in businesses.

The last 32-bit NetBurst (Pentium 4) systems with 2GB of RAM aren't that bad to work on, when given a video card that supports Windows 7/8 video features and a decently fast disk.

You don't need a whole lot more to run a greenscreen terminal emulator or a basic web browser.

Unfortunately Win8 requires NX so only the very last ones will work and Intel released socket compatible 64-bit capable NetBurst CPUs not long afterwards.

I'm actually in the market for a old dumb box and for power(i.e. energy/electricity) reasons I'm shying away from the PressHot - Pentiums. I'm targeting a Core 2 Duo which seem like a great balance between power and performance and I'm reasonably sure that the money I'd save by going this route would not be recovered over the course of 5 years if I get a more recent box.

You may go with one of the desktop Atoms. They can, IIRC, handle up to 4 GB of RAM and consume less power than a Core 2 Duo.

That might work. I'm looking for a pure file backup server that can receive the occasional fax and use PHP's sendmail function.

I think it is used on Clover Trail tablets (with 32-bit EFI!), as one example.

Are there any Clover Trail tablets with more than 4GB of RAM?

I think most if not all of them only have 2GB.

They cannot support anything more, clovertrail is a crappy stopgap that uses very old tech. -Source: I have a Thinkpad Tablet 2.

Sure. I have a scanner that is now useless because Canon never released a 64-bit driver. (The useful lifetime of a scanner is longer than the life of an individual PC or the time a manufacturer will support it.) Lots of scientific and industrial equipment will not have 64-bit drivers.

Try using VueScan. It supports a bunch of older scanners.

You could use it in a 32-bit VM. Since I went 64-bit, I've been using my Lide20 CanonScan though a 32-bit XP install in VirtualBox. Sure, the VM takes 20 seconds to boot to desktop, but that's better than junking a working piece of hardware simply because the manufacturer doesn't support it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com