Hi,

Stemming from #14397:

Background:

Over the years, Windows supported various processor architectures from various vendors, including Intel x86 (32-bit), AMD64, Itanium (now discontinued), and ARM family (32-bit and 64-bit). While the base machine architecture for NVDA is x86, it provides support for x64 (Intel and AMD) and ARM64 through remote helper libraries.

While #14397 highlighted the need to improve support for ARM64 machines, it brought up an unspoken questino: can NVDA effectively detect different machine architectures? Moreover, thinking about this issue led me to believe that it would be helpful to let NVDA report machine architecture as part of Windows version information, similar to what Resource Monitor add-on provides.

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

At the moment NVDA does recognize workstation versus server Windows releases, but not machine architecture, which could have helped debug #14397 and similar issues.

Describe the solution you'd like

Add machine architecture (WinVersion.architecture) property to WinVersion class and report it at startup. This allows developers to figure out if the issue is specific to an architecture such as AMD64 or AM64, as well as detect test machines easily once ARM machines are used more on the cloud (currently virtual machines on the cloud are powered by x64 processors).

In addition, the following changes can be made:

1. App modules: 64-bit process dtection becoes easier thanks to checking for Windows machine architecture check.
2. Update check: made simpler by fetching WinVersion property.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Leave code as is and rely on environment variables to detect machine architecture.

Additional context

For an example, see josephsl/resourcemonitor, specifically Windows version script (NVDA+Shift+number row 6).

Proposed solution:

Bring machine architecture detection code from Resource Monitor add-on to NVDA Core, likely to target 2023.1 or 2023.2. I'd be happy to mentor someone to bring this feature request to life.

Thanks.