How to run Intellij IDEA 12 as a 64 bit process on Win7?

Question

Have anyone tried this? I got one problem here. I have seen this post http://devnet.jetbrains.net/docs/DOC-1185 and done as what it said. But seems it doesn't work on my PC. Here are the system variables and Java version.

System variables:

Java version:

When I clicked "idea64.exe", an error occurred:

You can see "IDEA_JDK" in the first image. It has already been set, right? Even though I add "IDEA_JDK_64", the same error still happens.

As last, I tried "idea.bat" to see the exception details:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: Bad version n
umber in .class file
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:620)
at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(SecureClassLoader.java:12
4)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(URLClassLoader.java:260)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$100(URLClassLoader.java:56)
at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:195)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:188)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:306)
at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:268)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:251)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClassInternal(ClassLoader.java:319)

Seems it's due to inconsistent Java version between IDEA and OS. Should I update JDK to 1.6 or higher? If I want to keep using 1.5, how could I do?

Answer 1

It seems that the latest stable (11.1) version of IDEA requires JDK in version 1.6 or higher as defined here. You're trying to run even more recent version so IMO chances that it'll run with 1.5 are slim.