32 bits vs 64 bits

There are so often that we heard people mentioned about 32 bits OS and 64 bits OS. A lot of people ask me what is the difference between the two. After umpteen times of answering that, I finally decided to put it on below.

A 64 bits OS is optimized to run program that made full use of 64 bit processor whereas 32 bits OS or 32 bits program does not made use of the power 64 bits processor provided for.

To explain things further, a 32 bit processor can process 32 bits of information per clock cycle, on an AMD Athlon 64 3400+ at 2.4Ghz there are 2.4 billion clock cycles per second. A 64 bit processor can process 64 bits of information per clock cycle, effectively doubling the speed of the processor. In the real world you won't see a double in speed because there are other limiting factors to speed such as hard drive, memory, and motherboard architecture speeds. You should see a very noticable increase in speed with 64 bit operating systems and software. Computer systems running 32 bit processors can only handle 4Gb of memory. However, Microsoft Windows OS may not display the full 4GB.

64 bit processors can handle 16 exabytes of memory (that's over 16 billion gigabytes). Not a big deal now unless you are working with very large files, such as large video files. As a side note, Unix and Linux already have well developed 64 bit Operating systems as 64 bit processors have been around for a while, just not for the desktop world.

Customizing AutoCAD 2010: Keyboard Shortcuts

The following is an adaptation of an article from MyCADSite.

Everyone knows that the strength of AutoCAD is that it can be easily customized to suit the individual user requirements. This tutorial will show you how to create your own shortcut key. All the shortcut keys are actually stored in acad.pgp file which will be loaded when AutoCAD is started. Once you have Express Tools installed, you will have a tool called ALIASEDIT that be used to edit the acad.pgp file easily. Acad.pgp file is an ASCII file and you do equally a good job with a Notepad editor.

Type in ALIASEDIT and you will see a dialog box pop up. Press the Add button.
















In this example, I have created a shortcut for MATCHPROP which is usually MA. (You notice that M & A are located are opposite sides of the keyboard.) Since N is not used for anything yet, I am using it as the shortcut key for MATCHPROP. Press OK after that.

Now press Apply for the changes to take effect. A dialog box warning you that you are about to overwrite your acad.pgp file appears. Press yes, since we are sure that we did the correct changes.








Press Yes and you will see a message pop up that you have saved your changes and that your current AutoCAD session has been updated. You can now use the shortcut key you just added.