Easily Find Out If An EXE File Is 32-Bit Or 64-Bit

While to most end users, the difference between them isn’t exactly visible, there may be times when knowing whether the app you downloaded is 32-bit or 64-bit would be important, especially when it comes to drivers. At times, you might be trying to run a 64-bit file on a 32-bit computer and wondering why it isn’t working. If you quickly want to find that out for an app with a name that doesn’t make the distinction clear, it isn’t exactly possible just by looking at it or checking out its properties. Instead of going ahead with your best guesstimate in such a situation, why not be sure when you can? Simply open a Command Prompt window and get EXE 64bit Detector to find it out for you. The lightweight application is especially designed to ascertain the architecture of valid PE – portable executable – files, including EXE, OCX and DLL. Usage details & screenshots after the break.

You can download the program via the link at the bottom of this page. You needn’t install it; simply extract the contents of the ZIP file to a directory. To run it, launch Command Prompt as Administrator (it wouldn’t work otherwise), and then specify the app’s directory path.

Here’s a screenshot below. I’ve typed in the file path to ‘iexplore.exe’, to find out that it’s a 64-bit application.

The app also offers some additional information about the executable’s ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization), DEP (Data Execution Prevention) and SEH (Structured Exception Handling) status.

If you test EXE 64bit Detector on a 32-bit executable file, the application will be able to identify it as such as well.

A major benefit of EXE 64bit Detector’s being a portable app is that it’s easy to run it from a USB drive without the need to install it on any other computer you use. Apart from that, since it’s a command-line app, its operation can be largely automated through the use of scripts as well.

EXE 64bit Detector performed smoothly during testing on Windows 8. While its execution is fine, having to type in the -f parameter each time is a bit cumbersome. I’m not sure why the developer has made it mandatory, especially considering how the app just performs this one function. It would have been much easier to be able to just type exe64bitdetector followed by the file name or path.

EXE 64bit Detector runs equally well on both 32-bit and 64-bit machines, Windows XP and up. It was tested on Windows 8 Pro, 64-bit.

Download EXE 64bit Detector