Operating Systems and Hardware

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Now let's have a look at how operating systems interact with the hardware in your computer.

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At its heart, the operating systems is assisting the user to work with the hardware.

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We're gonna look at hardware it much more detail in domain to,

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but for now realize that there are several key hardware components inside your computer.

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There is the CPU, or central processing unit, the brains of the computer.

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The processor reads the instructions, written a program and then executes those instructions.

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There is a temporary storage for information called Ram

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Ram stands for random access memory.

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This is where your computer stores data while you work on it.

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For example, a document. Your anything is stored in the ram

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and, although ran, provides very fast access to your document while you work on it.

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The trouble with rhyme is that if you switch off the power,

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everything stored in rhyme is lost instantly.

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For that reason, it's called volatile Storage.

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So

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what if we don't want to lose everything as soon as we switch off?

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If you want to preserve whatever document you're working on, you need to save it to some form of non volatile storage.

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Ah, hard disk is an example of non volatile storage.

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Once your document is safe to desk, it will not be lost if you turn off the power to your computer

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and you'll be able to load it up again once you re boot the machine,

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there are input devices that allow us to interact with the computer. So the most common device is, of course, our keyboards on a mouse

01:48

these days. Touchscreens. I've also become popular as any input device, like on a smartphone or a tablet.

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You and I used these to track with the computer on the programs that it's running.

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The computer communicates with the user using output devices,

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for example, it can display something on a screen or print type something on a printer.

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These days, computers will often speak to you and accept voice input as well. Just mentioning that, even though that's not gonna be covered in this company exam. But it might be future ones.

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The voice interface is becoming more popular.

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You might have come across Amazons, Alexa, Google assistant,

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Microsoft Katana or Apple's Siri APS.

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These are all examples of a voice based interface. They will accept your voices, input on, they will respond by speaking to you.

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Um,

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this is not a completely perfected technology yet,

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but one day it could be the case that the primary way we interact with our computers is going to be speaking to them on. They're gonna speak back to us,

03:00

but that's something that's still a year or two down the line. I think

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now, at this point, we're going to take a little detour to talk about something called a winery.

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On a related term, you'll often hear bits

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via Larry, if you will recall, is the native language of your computer that is sequences of ones and zeros.

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So we're gonna define the term bit, and we're also gonna look att. What do we mean by 32 bit a bit 16 or 64 bit

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Later on, we're going to talk about 32 bit and 64 bit operating systems. CP use and drivers

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to explain this. We're going to go back to school and do a little math

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First off the binary number system, also known, is based to

03:53

hats. Our has only two digits zero and one.

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I compare that with decimal,

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as you already know

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decimal is a base 10 counting system. It has 10 digits available, zero through nine

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A bit refers to a single binary digits.

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And if you look carefully,

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you should be able to figure out why it's called a bit.

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But where the name comes from.

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So

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before we approach binary, let's just recap how decimal works,

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and then we'll get back to binary.

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Remember, the decimal only has 10 digits zero through nine as you see up here

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using a single digit.

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Therefore, you can only count from zero tonight.

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What happens when you reach nine?

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Once we have counted up to nine,

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we have used up all the available digits. 0123456789

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So the cop to the next number off tonight

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we resort to using two digits on. We write that out as 10

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we pronounce it as Ted.

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We could count numbers above nine using two digits,

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but only until we reach 99.

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At that point, all possible combinations of two digits are exhausted.

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So we have to start using

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three digits to indicate

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that we're going on to the next number, which we call 100

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so make sure that you grasp this, that

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once you have run out of all possible variations of ways particular digit in a particular counting system,

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we start using two digits,

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and once we have run out of all possible combinations are two digits. We start using three digits and so on.

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Now

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let's go back to finery

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had compared that side by side with decimals.

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The 1st 2 values in binary are zero and one, just like they are investable.

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So no difference that.

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But of course, in decimal, the next number that you could use his three. Because that's what we'll have more than two digits available.

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But in finery,

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Once you've used up zero and you've used up one,

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that's it. There are no other digits in the finery system.

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So what do we do

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when we run out of digits?

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Which will be much sooner than in decimal.

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We do this.

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We resort to using two digits,

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so the next two numbers in binary would be 10 and 11

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That's the equivalent of decimal three

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on decimal two.

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But once we've done those two

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again, we've run out of all possible variations of using two digits.

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So then we resort to three digits.

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And so we have 100 which is the equivalent of decimal four

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101 to the equivalent of decimal five on so on.

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So

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what happens when you run out of all possible values with three digits? Well, then we start using

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four digits. And so it goes on.

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Note that this table is also handy reference chart

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for converting between decimal and binary. For example, if you look at the decimal number nine,

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the binary equivalent of that is 1001

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So we learned a bit of our finery in the last section

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in this section. We're gonna take that idea and expand on it a little bit,

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and we're gonna talk about

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32 bit on 64 bit soupy use on 32 64 bit operating systems.

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So, firstly,

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there is this concept off the number of bits you can work with that one time.

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The earliest CP use were eight bitsy views. They could only process eight bits at a time.

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Now what this meant in practice is this so there on the screen, you see a ***

08:11

on DDE

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That's how data would be fed into the CPU eight bits at a time.

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The CPU would work on those eight bits following the instructions in the software,

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and then the output would be sent out in Bunches of eight bits at a time.

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As time went on,

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hardware vendors such as Intel and Eddie that produced CB use

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they started producing CPU is that could process 60 bits at a time,

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so that obviously meant that you could deal with twice as much data. Within one cycle, you could read in 16 bits. You could process 16 bits, and you could have put 16 bits.

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There were 32 bits at a time,

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and then there were CP use that could handle 64 bits at a time.

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As you might imagine, dealing with 64 bits at a time, rather than only eight bits of the time, is much faster.

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As we moved to greater numbers of bits, computers got faster and faster

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the computers we used today, which run Windows sometimes called IBM compatible PCs.

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And that's simply because the original peces were designed by the company. IBM

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IBM compatible PCs were originally based on a 16 bit Cebu, and he was called the eight Away six.

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The original PCs had operating systems such as DOS that were also 16 bit operating systems.

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In 1995 though, Intel released the Pentium Pro a 32 bits of you.

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Around the same time, Microsoft released Windows 95

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a 32 bit operating system that could take advantage of the new capabilities of a 32 bit CPU.

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Today,

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the bulk of sea views are 64 bits.

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However, the development of operating systems have lagged behind the development of the hardware.

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Let's just take a look at the advantage of 64 bit soupy use.

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Generally, the more *** you could breed in process, and I put at one time

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foster the speed of processing.

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The CPU also communicates with other components, such as RAM or storage 64 bits of time.

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That's probably obvious that with more bits,

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things like like Paul Step.

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What's less obvious is this. That 32 bit sleepy use our limited to four gigabytes of RAM.

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64 bit CIB use allow us to access much larger match of rat today. It is common for even consumer level PCs to have 16 gigabytes of RAM.

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The more ram you have, the larger the documents you could work with on more applications. You could run simultaneously and so on.

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So to really benefit, and to be able to use more than four gigabytes of RAM, you need a 64 bit super you

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on a 64 bit operating system

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now talking of operating systems,

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Um,

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they kind of like behind the development off the hard way.

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64 bit processes were around before 64 bit operating systems.

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If you installed a 32 bit operating system on its 64 bits CPU,

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it would switch the CPU down into 32. Bit about.

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That's rather like buying a sports car had been profiling the gas so it can only drive at 30 miles an hour,

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kind of a waste of money.

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Once 64 bit operating systems were released,

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a couple of other issues arose.

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Drivers for all of your hardware had to also be 64 bit.

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You couldn't use the old 32 bit drivers to access hardware from a 64 bit operating system,

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and vendors were kind of slow in developing 64 bit drivers and some never created them for certain hardware.

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So if you decided to install the 64 bit operating system,

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you might find that there are no drivers for some of your hardware.

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Another problem was that application step for 32 bit

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have to be translated in real time to 64 bit. In other words, every request made by the application to the operating system.

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The application issues that has a 32 bit command.

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It has to be translated into a 64 bit command and then passed on to the operating system.

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And when the operating system responds, it responds, using 64 bits that has to be converted into pretty to bits and then passed up to the application.

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So

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even though your operating system is running faster,

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if you're running a 32 bit application on it, yeah, it's running a bit faster. But also

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does this, um,

13:13

slowdown happening because of the translation between 32 64 beds?

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So it's a result of these kinds of issues. Adoption of 64 bit operating systems was Brunton be slow

13:31

today. The use of the 64 bit operating systems is far more widespread as some of those early problems no longer exists. For example, many applications have been rewritten as 64 bit applications, so there are natively on 64 bit operating systems

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without having that performance hit from doing translations between 32 64 bit

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64 Big drivers are not widely available for most hardware

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as computers and our ship with many gigabytes of RAM,

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32 bit operating systems are no longer suitable, as you can only access four gigabytes of RAM with 32 bit operating system.

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Today, desktops and even laptops are often equipped with 16 gigabytes or more.

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So, anyway, let's summarize the issues you need to learn for the exam.

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32 bit operating systems can be installed on computers with a 64 bit soupy you.

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But as I mentioned, they're gonna switch that CPU down, and it's gonna be operating as a 32 bit CPU.

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64 bit operating system, though, cannot be installed on computers, which only have a 32 bit super here.

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32 64 bit applications can be run on a 64 bit operating system. But remember the 32 bit applications are going to run somewhat slower than a 64 bit application. Will

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64 bit applications cannot be installed on a 32 bit operating system

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on drivers are not interchangeable.

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If you install 32 bit operating systems, you need 32 bit drivers for all your hardware. If you install that 64 bit operating system, you need 64 bit drivers for all of your hardware

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on. Finally, of course, this whole

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memory issue

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32 bit operating systems can only access up to four gigabytes of RAM.

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But

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64 bit operating systems can access vast amounts of ran much before gigabyte limit no longer applies to them.

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So how can you tell whether your CPU and your operating system is 32 or 64 bit?

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Well, they're usually tools that will give you this information. For example, in Windows, you can look in a tool called system properties.

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Uh,

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what you see there is 64 bit systems are indicated with the X 64 that's listed that,

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uh, note that

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32 bit CP use would actually be indicated by Exit six, not as you might expect X 30 to remember that for the exam