Vista 32 or 64?

I am running Vista 64 bit with no issue. I do have 4 gig of ram so that is not an issue. Also I have had zero issue with compatibility. russdmoore

Wow..I have a issue with the work issue.......eek :)

I am running Vista 64 bit with no issue. I do have 4 gig of ram so that is not an issue. Also I have had zero issue with compatibility. russdmoore

I was with a friend when he upgraded to 64-bit and there was a long list of incompatibilities. He later installed the 32-bit version that worked fine. Depends on what applications you're using.

I'll go 64-bit when I start seeing games offering 64-bit versions of the software. Until then, there's no point in it.

what is 64 bit? like whats the real difference?Cajones_Del_Mar

This will take a bit to explain, but it's an overly simplified explanation.

This boils down to the number of bits the processor can hold in one given register, to then do operations on that one register (+-*/). Think of the register as one box that can hold all 64 bits. The number of bits determines how big the number can be. For example, an 8-bit CPU register can hold a number from 0 to 255, a 16-bit register, 0 to 65535, 32-bit register, 0 to 4294967295 and last but not least, a 64-bit register can hold a number from 0 to 18446744073709551615. This is why going from 16-bit windows to 32-bit windows was a huge thing but 32-bit to 64-bit is not that huge because we have't maxed out 32 bit yet. Look at the size difference in the numbers from 16 to 32 bit.

In your average applications, 64-bit doesn't mean that much. Please, hold your hate mail, I'll explain why. Most apps do very little floating point calculations or needs to hold a number as high as 4294967295. Scientific apps and games are the exception. Now, a 32-bit CPU can work with a 64-bit floating point number (1234.6784) but it has to do extra work because it's registers only hold 32 bits. This is one of the reasons floating point calculations are slow.

64-bit will be a big help for games because all floating point calculations can be done in one 64-bit register without any extra work. Right now, in your 32-bit game, the floating point calculations are done in 64-bit to preserve precision, which is slower, because two registers need to be used. For scientific apps, the 32-bit CPU can simulate an 80 bit floating point number but forcing a 32-bit CPU to work with 80 bits is very slow and scientific apps could benifit from more bits and higher precision. So just like a 32-bit CPU can manage 64-bit floating point numbers, a 64-bit CPU will be able to do the same with 128-bit floating point numbers.

So until games start shipping with 64-bit versions, your web browser, word processor, vidoe player, chat program and the such don't care and won't make use of 64 bits.

Umm, yeah???

This is what I have learnt by going through a few forums, when I had the same question. *Apologies if my understanding is a bit Skewif*

All I know is that 64 bit will utilise your 4gig of ram. Where as the 32 bit utilises only a max of 3gig. Only thing is, at the moment there can be a lot of incompatibilities with driver software. If you were to go 64bit, research whether your hardwares software will be compatible.

And from what I have heard, If you were to splash out and buy Vista Ultimate - it apparently comes with both 32 and 64 bit.

Here is a link to where I was discussing it (I'm MrM0nstah):

http://www.gamearena.com.au/forums/subscribed/thread.php/4482450

All I know is that 64 bit will utilise your 4gig of ram.Grayzer

That is actually because of XP and not the 32 bit CPU. Here's an example. On a 16-bit CPU, the highest number it can hold in one register is 65535 so in theory, you can only use 64K of ram assuming it's a flat memory model. K = 1024 bytes so 64 * 1024 = 65535.

So in 32 bit flat memory, 4,294,967,295 (= 4 gigs) is all the ram you can address. Even today, most computer users don't need more then 2 gigs on XP.

XP doesn't see all 4 gigs of ram for software issues. It's not the hardware or the 32-bit cpu that's the problem. Win95/98/ME are 32 bit systems and they only saw about a gig if you messed with the settings.

Chances are XP has these software limitations hard coded in and they will leave them in because they want you to move to Vista. Just like DirectX10 will never run on XP.

The other thing to note is that most of that market place is XP so games aren't going to expect you to have a full 4 gigs of ram available. I would argue that most games don't need more then 2 gigs. I know it's disappointing to have purchased all that ram and XP doesn't see some of it. No software would be using that much right now anyways.

So that's why I say, until 64-bit versions of games start shipping, there's no reason to move to 64-bit. To be honest, for the whole 64-bit thing to work well, the computer industry as a whole needs to move there and no ones in a hurry right now.