How do I get this 64bit program to run?
QMy daughter was given Adobe After Effects ( www.snipca.com/28921) for her birthday because she needs it for some school work she is doing. Her laptop runs Windows 10, but it’s the 32bit edition, and Adobe’s latest version of After Effects won’t run on a 32bit computer – it needs to be 64bit. Now she is urgently seeking advice on how we can make this work. She can’t afford a new version of Windows and has lots of course work on her laptop so is reluctant to do a fresh installation with a new 64bit version of Windows. Is there an affordable way around this? Dave Knight
AThere may be an affordable solution, but it’s not necessarily a simple one. You haven’t told us about the laptop or how you originally obtained its copy of Windows 10. If you upgraded from, say, a 32bit edition of Windows 7, that’s where the affordable route ends: the upgrade licence from Microsoft is for the 32bit edition of Windows 10 only.
If, on the other hand, you bought Windows 10 separately as a ‘retail’ package and for some reason installed it as a 32bit version, your daughter will be able to use the same product key to upgrade to the 64bit edition at no extra charge. However, this requires a ‘clean’ install, so she would have to back up everything on her PC and reinstall it all afterwards.
The first step is to create an installation disc or USB stick using the Microsoft’s media-creation tool, which you can download for free from www.snipca. com/28566 (see screenshot above). Double-click the downloaded file to start the instructions. At the ‘What do you want to do?’ screen, choose ‘Create installation media (USB flash drive, DVD, or ISO file) for another PC’ (see screenshot bottom left). Then, when the tool has finished creating the disc (or USB stick), insert it into the laptop and restart. Follow the prompts, then, at the ‘Select language, architecture and edition’ page, choose ‘64-bit (x64)’ from the Architecture menu (see screenshot bottom right). Click Next, then continue following the prompts to complete the installation.
The only other possibility – and we wouldn’t recommend it – is to install a standalone copy of Windows 10 into a virtual PC. As long as your daughter’s laptop has a processor with a 64bit architecture – which almost any PC from the past decade or so does – it’s possible to install and run 64bit virtual machines on a 32bit operating system. She could then install the 64bit edition of After Effects into the virtual PC running on 32bit edition of Windows 10. Virtualbox ( www.virtualbox.org) is a popular free virtualisation tool.
However, the result would probably be impossibly slow, to the point that it would be unusable. Then there’s the small matter of licensing: Microsoft licenses Windows to work on one PC at a time, so even if it worked well enough to use, it would undoubtedly break the terms of your Windows 10 licence.