If you have bought a computer in recent years, it is more than likely that it runs 64-bit Windows . Microsoft continues to produce 32-bit copies of Windows 10, although far fewer are sold and deployed than 64-bit ones.
Microsoft has not published statistics on how the distribution is distributed between 32-bit and 64-bit systems, although if you look at the latest Steam survey on hardware you can see that right now 64-bit is the predominant architecture. This is something we can expect, especially considering that the newer AAA titles require a lot of RAM . Even so, and according to the Steam survey, 64 bits are the preferred platform for users with 48.37% of the total for Windows 10 of that architecture.
In the field of software things are different . A large number of applications are only available in 32-bit versions, either that or the 32-bit version is prioritized over the 64-bit version. This is the case of the Firefox browser, for example. Mozilla continues to release new versions of it browser for x86 architectures, although it is gradually moving to x86_64.
For its part, Microsoft has already taken some steps by eliminating a 32-bit system , as happened with Windows Server 2008 for x86 architectures .
How to find out if a program is 64-bit
Although there are many differences between programs written for x86 and those developed for x86_64, the most important is that 64-bit programs for Windows consume more RAM . Apart from this, programs created for this architecture use more RAM, tend to offer more security benefits, and tend to weigh more on the hard drive.
That said, it can be said that there are many ways to determine whether a program is 32-bit or 64-bit. The easiest way to do it is to use the Task Manager .
To open it we will use the shortcut Ctrl-Shift-Esc . What we will do next is to add a column dedicated to the Task Manager that will allow us to see at a glance whether a process is 32-bit or 64-bit.
First, we must display the details of the processes that the system has open. Otherwise, what we will get is a non-functional window that provides us with very fair information that we cannot work with.
The processes tab does not provide us with information -for now- regarding whether a program is 32-bit or 64-bit, so we switch to the Details tab . There we right-click on the title bar of each column and click the Select columns option . There we look for the Platform column and select it. Click OK to save the changes.
Once we have done it, the Task Manager will show us the processes informing us of their architecture.
As you can see, it is a process that is not difficult . It is very easy to carry out and with a few clicks we can have more information about what type of programs we have installed on our PC.