32-bit or 64-bit Vista?

I`m going to be buying Windows Vista in the near future but I`m really not sure whether I should be going for the 32-bit or 64-bit version. From what I understand 32-bit is much more compatible but 64-bit offers better performance and the ability to use more than 3gb ram.

My question is will the 64-bit version be worth it over the 32-bit version? Will I really experience that much difference?

I`ve been told by a computer supplier that most people who buy the 64-bit version have had lots of problems that dissapeared as soon as they went back to the 32-bit version of Vista. Is this sound advice?

Thanks for any advice.
Jason.

That is the answer. If you use only lattest software and you need more than 3GB use Vista64. Else use XP or Vista32 if you need DX10.

bye

I used to triple-boot between XP 32-bit, Vista 64-bit and Ubuntu 64-bit. I can't say I had any problems at all. Drivers were readily available for everything on my laptop.

I've got Win2008 64-bit running on some 4+ year-old hardware. Had problems with my SB Audigy 1 sound card. Would lock the machine up, randomly. Might just be a dodgy card though (it's very old).

All in all, you really shouldn't experience any unsurmountable issues running the 64-bit version of Vista, compared to the 32-bit version.

There's easy answer to this:

"Do you need to run any 64 bit apps that don't have a 32bit equivilent?".

If you answered "yes", install 64 bit edition (Maybe one a 1000 people).

If you answered "no", install 32 bit edition.

Darkheart

If you have 5+ old hardware/software, stick with 32bit (but run MS' upgrade advisor to check that there won't be any problems first). Otherwise, you should be fine with 64 bit.

If you are buying retail (may or may not apply to OEM) the package should contain the 32bit disc. You can then order the 64bit disc from the MS website (for 'free' + really expensive shipping cost) - this will give you the best of both worlds.

Thanks for the help, pretty much as I suspected.

Jason.

I'm running 64-bit Vista, I haven't had any big problems with software being incompatible. The only one I can think of was trying to run a dos game, but I guess that will have trouble running on XP even.

Can I finally ask, do the following programs work normally on Vista 64-Bit? Is there a definitive list somewhere? These types of programs do not seem to be listed on the ones I`ve looked at.

Blitz 3D
Blitz Max
Lightwave 7.5
Paint Shop Pro
Pro Motion
FL Studio
Mole Box Pro

If anyone is running any these successfully then please let me know. I assume that a lot of the initial problems that I have seen have been ironed out by now and that most things work. Should most older software work without problems? (Not ancient, five years old ish...)

Thanks for any help,

Jason.

Not running 64 bit Vista, but I run 64 bit XP, so I would expect similar results.

I have not had any problems with anything not running, even older stuff. Blitz runs just fine. The only issue I have is Quicktime. For some reason Apple has not released a 64 bit version yet. It's fine if I just want to view a movie, but what I can't do is read/write a quicktime file from a 64 bit application. I use 3dsMax, and I have to flip back and forth between the 32 bit version and 64 bit version of Max depending if I need to use quicktime or not. It's not a major thing, but more of an annoyance.

I've been running vista64 for a while now, and I must say that the experience is much better than I had anticipated up front.

Driver support for Vista64 is actually pretty good for relatively modern hardware.

Pretty much any 32 bit program works under vista64, *except* those that do driver-level operations. In my case, there were just a few programs that weren't compatible:

- WS_FTP Pro (Thanks to the integration of FTP into windows explorer. Newer versions are compatible. I ended up switching to FileZilla which is free and worked without problems)
- WebDrive (Which allows you to map drive letters to an FTP site. Newer versions are compatible)
- AnyDVD (filters DVDdrive data, essentially making your drive region-free among others. Newer versions are compatible)
- Nero Burning ROM 6 (Version 8 and up are compatible)

'normal' 32bit programs like BlitzMax, Photoshop, paintshop, office, Skype, etc. all run without problems at all. I don't play many games, but the ones I do play all worked flawlessly. (Warcraft 3 - Frozen Throne, Sam & Max season 1, the old Sam & Max Hit the Road, bunch of casual games)

I use AVG Free for antivirus which workls without problems, although I could see possibly not all antivirus solutions working thanks to the driver-level stuff

I kept a dual-boot to XP32 in case any compatibility issues popped up, but I haven't used that one at all since pretty much everything works just fine under Vista64.

I did upgrade my machine to 6GB for next to nothing, and love being able to use it all. (Note that a 32-bit program like photoshop will still be bound to the 32-bit memory restrictions, so the individual 32-bit application is 'only' able to use 3GB of the memory in the system. Of course, other programs still have access to the rest of the RAM.

Note that you cannot run 16-bit programs at all.

Also, unlike Vista32, Vista64 requires signed drivers. That means that you're going to be fine with hardware/software from mainstream manufacturers, but some of the more fringe open-source stuff is unlikely to have 64-bit drivers available to them thanks to the extra cost for getting the binaries signed. (the only way to use unsigned drivers is to press F8 on bootup and disable the driver check)



Not entirely true: Do you have 3GB RAM installed and still occasionally run out of memory or experience slowdowns due to swapping?

If yes, then you benefit from installing more RAM and switching to a 64-bit OS to be able to actually use it.

In general Vista64 with 6GB feels much snappier on my home computer than Vista32 with 3GB does on my work computer, with pretty much identical specs otherwise.

I think the difference is mostly in your head, most people will simply not use over 3GB of RAM normally. Hell I have Citrix Servers with 30 odd people on them running, Oracle, Office and a bunch of other apps and all together they barely use 6GB of memory. 6GB of memory for a workstation is excessive right now and won't make any difference to performance.

Darkheart

It really depends on what you're doing -- I can easily use up several GB with photoshop, especially after increasing the undo levels and such.

Another memory hog is VMWare workstation, where you can run a virtualized operating system in a sandbox. Any memory assigned to one of those get taken away from your 'real' OS, and it does add up quickly.

But yeah, for a 'normal' user system it's probably overkill.

Vista will use 3gb if you have it. Superfetch is pretty efficient and makes the computer quite a lot more responsive, plus you have quite a lot more control of indexing than you used to in XP. So you can set your system up to work much more efficiently with the extra ram.

Plus you have readyboost which lets you use USB sticks as extra ram for the prefetch which although slower data rate than HD's have instant seek times. Got good results in tests at Tom's Hardware

I heard that vista64 was slower at 32 bit code and only really useful for optimal performance in 64 bit apps. Not many of those around.

do vista64

Both work fine for the most part. Games compiled in older versions of B3D will have problems and Max is tricky to get MinGW set up correctly, but it can be done with (usually) a lot of fiddling around.


With a RAM meter in my sidebar, I can see that I constantly use over 3GB of my 4GB of memory, especially during intensive tasks such as most modern games.


Would only really recommend that for people with low amount of RAM, say under 2GB or so. While it never gives a negative performance hit, it really doesn't provide any help at all when you have tonnes of memory to begin with.


It is theoretically slower for 32 bit apps due to the abstraction layer required, however you'll never actually notice the difference.

Neither!

That really depends on the application and processor you have.

64-bit windows has an emulation layer called WOW64 (...Windows On Windows.. not world of warcraft :-P... ) which manages all 32-bit emulation.

Under Itanium processors, the overhead to emulating a 32-bit application is a bit more as it's instruction translation is a bit more involved, but the resulting instruction sets are often more efficient, so there is usually a good chance of performance gain here despite that overhead.

If you have an Intel x64 based processor, it will generally run at a comparable speed. Some apps will indeed run slower, but applications that typically require a lot of memory will run faster because the 64-bit OS sitting underneath the emulation will be able to address more physical memory than you would in a true 32-bit environment.

Of the two, x64 is the most widely supported in terms of drivers and native software on Windows. It's instruction set is a lot closer to x86, and therefore fewer direct compatibility issues exist.

The only environments that WOW64 doesn't support are 16-bit applications (or 32-bit apps containing 16-bit API calls), and Kernal-mode 32 bit applications.

In other words.. almost all modern software designed under normal windows development conventions should be compatible (provided the software doesn't attempt something bizarre like installing a 32-bit hardware driver of some sort)

I shold go and run Intels new not released 128bit with 255 core :)