I'm seeing two versions of Vista up for sale, a 32 bit version and a 64 bit version. If I buy one of them, am I stuck with it?
And more to the point, which one should I get? I've got a processor capable of handling 64 bit, but does it work properly? If I use the 64 bit version, can I play my oh so lovely games?
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There isn't really any issue with 64-bit, apart from the fact that Microsoft wussed out at the last minute and didn't make it 64-bit only. Yeah there's drivers that don't work, yeah there's programs that don't work, but for 90% of programs you can run them fine through the transparent emulation..
Try and find 64-bit drivers for your mobo, graphics, lan, audio stuff before you do anything though..
I don't see going either route as being a bad decision really, when it comes right down to it, though. Compatibility hassles with the 64-bit version are negligible, but so are the advantages at this point. I would and have gone 64-bit without any regrets, though, so that's my recommendation.
And a 64-bit OS is largely unnecessary right now. You gain some significant security benefits (bottom of this article) but lose app and hardware compatibility. Right now, your applications won't perform any faster either. Read Paul Thurrott's (his a Windows guru) review here first.
More than 4gigs you mean.
Actually, he's half right. The Win32 architecture only allows any individual process to allocate 2 GB of memory at a time. So for application developers, Win64 means going beyond the 2 GB limit.
Anyhow, 64bit edition on an Athlon 64 is fast as all hell. I remember watching the betas running on my friend's computer. Even though it was buggy as hell, anything 64-bit native was running at least twice as fast as its 32-bit counterpart.
We may see this change with newer, more demanding games. The common line seems to be that we'll start seeing big gains when games are able to effectively utilize more than 2GB of memory.
I haven't researched this in quite awhile, however, so I would look for benchmarks comparing recent 64-bit native game binaries with their 32-bit counterparts. I haven't heard a lot of noise about the issue though, so I assume the answer is still the same.
well technically you're both half-right.
32-bit can allocate 4gb of memory. by default it is split 2gb for kernel process (os, system) and 2gb for user process(games and whatever).
however you can change the ratio to say...1gb kernel, 3gb user (which I had to do to get Stalker to work in vista 32. it wanted to use more than 2gb of ram)
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