Should i upgrade to xp64

sativa1874 · 30 Sep 2006 at 23:12

I was thinking of upgrading from xp pro to xp64, Do you think it is worthwhile or will i not notice much diffrence?

Day03 · 30 Sep 2006 at 23:15

The operating system will not give you any performance advantage over 32bit. It's only worthwhile if you are going to use 64bit programs with it. At the moment there are not many of these. It's better to wait for 64bit Vista. The drivers for 64bit OS are not 100% perfected yet so if you have no reason to upgrade then I would say stick with 32bit for now.

bledd · 1 Oct 2006 at 00:36

stick with 32bit, its a lot snappier

growse · 1 Oct 2006 at 01:00

bledd. said:
stick with 32bit, its a lot snappier

Neither is "snappier" imo. A lot of what people call "snappier" is placebo effect, when it comes to comparing similar OS's.

I'd say upgrade to 64 bit if you want to have a bit of a play, for the hell of it. I'd try it to make sure all your hardware is supported under drivers. If, like me, you have 4GB RAM or more and do a lot of photoshopping on some fairly hefty files, it's nice to be able to use a lot of RAM all in one go.

Apart from that, it's not much benefit over 32bit, and even lacks one or two features. It's certainly not to upgrade just to "see a difference", because you won't in terms of day to day stuff.

bledd · 1 Oct 2006 at 01:45

if you disable all visual effects, 32bit xp is quite good, wheras the 64bit seems a bit laggier

with heavily nlited installs, the 32bit is a fair bit faster in this respect than its 64bit cosusin

Tony Williams · 1 Oct 2006 at 01:46

To be fairly honest I would stay with the 32 bit version, the x64 has lack of driver support and even if you do have all the drivers, what happens if further down the line you need a new componant only to find it's not supported? I used x64 for a couple of months and thought it was great untill everything was installed, ended up slower than x86, so I went back and I'm glad.

Steedie · 1 Oct 2006 at 09:54

bledd. said:
stick with 32bit, its a lot snappier

Other way round in my opinion. Used both, and find xp64 to be a bit quicker. Not to mention a lot more stable

Glaucus · 1 Oct 2006 at 10:10

It's not worth it.

Vista is absolutely fantastic, so wait until thats released and get the 64bit version.

beh · 1 Oct 2006 at 11:51

I'm confused as to how people could find xp64 slower. From my experience it seems to run everything much the same.

The 64bit drivers that are available are perfectly decent and for most recent hardware at least the support is there.

The OS itself seems very solid and obviously benefits from being based on newer code.

Although, not saying its necessarily worth the upgrade. I wouldn't go out and buy a copy of it, and if you don't currently need a fresh install of something its not worth the effort.

sativa1874 · 1 Oct 2006 at 22:35

Thanks for the advice i will stick with xp, Wages burning a hole in my pocket
:rolleyes:

ReeceKB · 1 Oct 2006 at 22:46

Day03 said:
The operating system will not give you any performance advantage over 32bit. It's only worthwhile if you are going to use 64bit programs with it. At the moment there are not many of these. It's better to wait for 64bit Vista. The drivers for 64bit OS are not 100% perfected yet so if you have no reason to upgrade then I would say stick with 32bit for now.

Yea I installed the 120day trial and found out my modem drivers diddent come in 64bit

so had to go back yo 32bit xp