Yes, I know, I'm just a little crazy to try to use Office 2013, and the  x64 version, but....

I've changed recently my computer, getting a new Dell Precision, delivered with a Windows 8.1 x64 OS. I bought a license of Office 2013 Pro too. No DVD was provided in the package, only the product key, and a download from the Microsoft download center has to be done. When using the retrieved setup.exe, the user does not have the hand on the way to install it: the only choices that can be done are the selection of the country and the language. For example, there is no option to install only some components and not all, this will, for instance, install Publisher and so on. The destination folder cannot be changed too. The installation using this process is done in the Program Files folder.

That's why I believed that the Office provided with my x64 OS was a x64 version. Unfortunately, that was not the case. I've spent one night with the MS support, in order to know how to download the x64 version. The guy was unable to explain it to me.

Finally, I've found the solution myself. The license paid to get the Office 2013 does not restrict to a x86 version, so there is no legal limitation to get a x64 one. This post will explain how to download the x64 version from the Microsoft download center.

Fine, you just wanted to use a x64 OS, because you need to make a lot of calculations for financial softwares, make videos, to play or whatever else. You just forget that most of current applications are still in x86, with plugins in Explorer, providing right-click menu items, which, infortunately, won't appear in the x64 explorer, because the plugin is a dll which was x86 built and cannot be loaded by the x64 explorer...

It's one of my best usual case: people are coming to me to see what happened when some server process on production is frozen. Of course, even if logs are written and dumped somewhere, in most cases, they are not enough to detect what happens really.

The same scenario occurs when an access violation is followed by a crash of the process, when we need a post-mortem analysis.

Everybody could tell me that we just have to write such a treatment in C# or Java to get the call stack at this moment, but the subject of this post is not what development language to use but what to do when something like that occurs on a production server.