In this particular case, memory addressing.

At my previous job, I saw things smack the hard wall of 32 bit limits, and slowly transition to 64 bit. And here I am, different job, and seeing the same thing again. And it is frustrating to see things are actually worse now for the consumer space. Plenty of warning that problems were coming, and nothing.

Well, I suppose I should specify here, this is mostly a Windows desktop issue. Windows server has been out as 64 bit for a while, and the major apps too. Linux has been ready for a long time, but hasn't broken into the consumer space in any serious way as a desktop platform. OS X is ready, but only just recently, and still is a small segment.

Microsoft? Gleefully still letting OEMs ship out 32 bit versions of Windows, even on boxes leaving the factory with 4gb of RAM. No unification of the installer to just do the right thing. And it's going to bite a lot of people hard here soon. It's already happening in the enthusiasts areas, it's only a matter of time for the rest of the space.

I also saw first hand today how Vista 64 doesn't handle things well when put under pressure. Running a process that was chewing on all four cores on my processor, and taking about 1.7-2.0 gb of ram. Things were ok for a while, but I walked away and the screensaver and lock occurred. Came back, and waited over 3 minutes for it to decide to unlock. And then found the source of the slowdown. My process was stalled, but still had memory held. And the display system (likely Aero) had 2.9 gigs of memory. How did this OS ship again? And why didn't SP1 fix anything? I was so frustrated by this that I reloaded the box with XP Pro 64 bit before calling it a day. I mean, I know Vista sucks. But we said XP sucked too when it came out. But not nearly this bad. XP was at least usable.

*sigh*