Not at all, we were actually discussing this last month and many other admins admitted they'd downloaded the wrong file even when they knew the difference because the names can be so similar (arm64 vs amd64 vs x86_64 all part of a long filename).

Let's re-task this issue to making the recommended Windows install process easier (because IT admins have enough to think about as it is).

Possible solutions I'm exploring (we can implement one or more of these):

A) We can work on a powershell script that just downloads and installs the latest GAM version for the device architecture similar to what the Bash script does for Linux / macOS.

Example one liner: powershell -NoProfile -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "Invoke-WebRequest -UseBasicParsing https://gam-shortn.appspot.com/install.ps1 | Invoke-Expression"
we'll want to get some tester feedback on how reliably this works on various Windows installs in locked down school/business environments.
Should the script download and run the MSI installer or should it just download the .zip file and extract that itself bypassing Windows installer entirely? .zip would be easier but is less integrated with native Windows package management (how do I uninstall this thing?) We might be able to automate a silent / no prompt MSI install?

B) The MSI installers can potentially detect the wrong architecture and offer a better error message like: "please download the file named x86_64".

x86_64 Windows cannot run ARM64 binaries but ARM64 Windows can run x86_64 binaries. However there's really no good cause to do so and we can probably catch both scenarios and give the admin a clear error of what they did wrong.

C) Develop a universal installer MSI and GAM command

per-arch MSIs are compiled / built into a single .MSI or .exe that just chooses the right arch to install.
For the .zip, we could build a gam.cmd file that detects system arch and calls gam-x86-64.exe or gam-arm64.exe as necessary.

A involves the least change to existing process / builds and is something we can start testing now. B can also be implemented and shouldn't be to problematic as we're just giving admins better errors but Windows installer and MSI is a horrible system and I dread touching it. It makes simple everyday needs like this 10x harder then they should be. C would involve some significant changes to our installers and binaries and there's a significant convenience task, to let GAM just do the right architecture thing the admin needs to download a file twice the size and run an additional process in the background on every gam command (gam.cmd process).

Improve admin experience on Windows with x86_64 / ARM64 selection. #1872

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