64-bit verses 32-bit . . . What's right for you?
Recently we been hit with a rash of inquiries around whether folks should install the 32-bit version of the PowerPivot client, or go with the larger capacity 64-bit version. Office 2010 is the first version of Office to offer a native 64-bit option. In previous releases, you had to install the 32-bit version to run under WOW (Windows-On-Windows) mode. WOW emulates a 32-bit environment under the 64-bit OS. That is cool and all, but you were still limited by the 32-bit address space (2GB of memory). Now with Office 2010 64-bit the memory use is virtually unlimited for a client application.
So where to begin . . . Being a geek, let’s start off with a technical topic.