How can I tell if I have the 64-bit edition of Windows?

Date:	November 19, 2003 / year-entry #136
Tags:	tipssupport
Orig Link:	https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20031119-00/?p=41773
Comments:	6
Summary:	Answer: Your wallet is empty. Seriously, there is no way you bought an Itanium by mistake. They are expensive machines: The entry-level workstation available from HP (who co-developed the Itanium with Intel) goes for over $3000 and the entry-level server is over $13,000. And in addition to paying for the computer itself, you probably had...

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Staffan Larsen says:

November 21, 2003 at 6:14 am

The real question is: How do I tell programmatically if I am running on a 64-bit box?

Daniel says:

November 21, 2003 at 10:28 am

$3,000 for an itanium box. Criminy. I own a computer shop and just built an Opteron for for a customer a third of that. He’s one of those "gotta have the biggest, baddest, fastest…" guys and understands that it will be a bit before there is a 64-bit OS for him.

Let’s not get into an AMD vs. Intel war. I’m actually an Intel fan.

Raymond Chen says:

November 21, 2003 at 1:04 pm

Most of the time you shouldn’t be trying to detect whether you are running on a true 32-bit machine or on a 64-bit machine via emulation – just let the emulator do its thing.

If you really need to check, call IsWow64Process. But use this power only for good, not for evil!

John Topley says:

November 21, 2003 at 1:07 pm

It’s a shame HP strangled the Alpha AXP CPU that they acquired from DEC by way of Compaq.

Raymond, care to comment on the rumour that Microsoft had an internal version of Windows NT running on Sparc? ;-)

Norman Diamond says:

December 15, 2003 at 2:18 am

To John Topley:

Don’t blame HP for strangling Alpha. At a time when DEC was selling Alphas (or pretending to do so), and Intel was selling 32-bit microprocessors, DEC published a newspaper advertisement saying that Intel’s microprocessors were the best in the business.

That’s not the reason why DEC died of course, but it sure didn’t help any. DEC was DEC’s worst enemy in many ways.

August 4, 2004 at 8:51 am

Commenting closes after two weeks.

http://weblogs.asp.net/oldnewthing/archive/2004/02/21/77681.aspx