64 bit windows

When I purchased my computer I was Told that the Athlone 64 processor was ready for 64 bit windows. I can't beleive it's that simple. What else will I have to change?

Yeh, good question - I'm not just going to install Windows 64 without knowing what the story is.

I've hardly noticed a glut of games that have 64bit support - FarCry does - but that is the only one I know of.

As far as I'm aware, all the work is done via the drivers which are installed with the WindowsXP 64-bit edition no?

Shouldn't really be needing to touch anything to get "64-bit" working.

What you will want to do is make sure anything you need to use on your computer (ie gfx card, snd card, printer, scanner, whatever) has a 64 bit driver. 32 bit drivers don't work on a 64 bit OS. 64 bit drivers will be associated with the terms "Windows XP 64", "XP64" or "X64", as opposed to the 32 bit counterparts "Windows XP", "XP" and "X86".

I'm now intrigued to know if anyone has installed it then turned off the computer and then stuck in a 32bit CPU - just to see what happens. I'm intrigued as to whether it would boot.

My best guess is that it would complain about there not being a 64bit CPU very early in the booting process. =]

Windows usually complains regardless if there's a major hardware changed involved since last boot-up.

Make sure that every single one of your hardware components has 64-bit windows drivers available... The biggest problem with 64-bit is that the device drivers are few and far between..

good chance that your modem / video capture card / soundcard / printer / scanner / whatever won't have 64-bit drivers, and will effectively become unusable after upgrading windows.

There are no drivers because no one is using it, and no one is using it because there are no drivers. :-?

They say Vienna will probably be 64bit only... I'd say by that stage 64bit support for Vista if not XP would be widespread and no longer an issue. So reconsult then. =]

There are many 64 bit drivers, it's just that there's so many different peripherals out there that there's still a lot of kit without 64 bit drivers.

Up until at least 6 months ago, there were no 64 bit drivers for my Canon printer. Canon had no plans to make one available.

Considering that I detected no speed increase in using XP 64 bit over the 32 bit version, and I don't have (or need) 4GB of RAM, running 64 bit XP is utterly superfluous.

I do, however, run 64 bit Ubuntu on a spare drive ;)

Heh. By the way things have been going for the last couple of years, you'll have a 128 bit CPU before Vista hits the streets. :-?

I'm using xp64, runs just the same as xp32.