Take the 2-minute tour ×  I don't know about vista. I never used
it. I just moved from XP (32 bit) to Windows 7 Ultimate
(64-bit). I was expecting c:\windows\system64 directory similar
to c:\windows\system32. Why is still entire system is located in
system32? Why isn't there any system64 directory?  share|improve
this question  1 Answer 1  up vote 4 down vote accepted
Backwards compatibility reasons. A whole lot of applications
assume things they shouldn't assume and hard-code paths. And
yes, that includes 64-bit applications. So on 64-bit Windows the
folder system32 actually contains the 64-bit versions of DLLs.
For the 32-bit DLLs there is the folder SysWoW64 which is what
32-bit applications see as system32.  share|improve this answer
Um, they didn't exactly worry about backwards compatibility when
they created the system32 folder. Yes, the older system folder
still exists for any old programs that relied on it, but they
created the new one anyway. I don't see why they could not do
the same here: leave th