Good reasons to keep 32-bit Microsoft Windows desktop OSes

Posted by Mark Henderson on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Mark Henderson
Published on 2012-09-18T00:23:24Z Indexed on 2012/12/19 5:04 UTC
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Windows

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Microsoft

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32bit-64bit

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operating-system

Server software has been 64-bit only for a while now (Since Server 2008 R2 for Windows, even earlier for Exchange and Sharepoint) and even Ubuntu are pushing you away from 32-bit versions for their server OSes.

But is there any good, quantifiable reason to keep a 32-bit desktop operating system maintained? We're preparing our Windows 8 images for the (unfortunate?) few that will be early adopters.

The majority of our desktop computers have 4gb or less of RAM, but I would love to not have to bother supporting a 32-bit flavoured operating system any more.

Any reason why I should?

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