The advice in the ZDNet article is for non-technical folks. The greatest likelihood is that they'll need a JRE for running Java in a web browser, not doing deve

The advice in the ZDNet article is for non-technical folks. The greatest likelihood is that they'll need a JRE for running Java in a web browser, not doing development. In which case they should use the 32-bit version, even on 64-bit Windows. If you're doing development, well then shame on you for not already knowing what you need. You also probably won't want the JRE, you'll want the JDK, which doesn't come with the shovelware anyway. If you're a developer and you just need to run some Java utilities, then you'll probably be fine with the 32-bit JRE. Basically, if you really need the 64-bit version, you probably already know it.