Time for 64 bit yet?

The Halk

The Halk

The Halk

Soldato
Joined
13 May 2003
Posts
11,865
Location
Hamilton
About 3 or 4 years ago I was thinking about switching to 64 bit OS. Quickly I came to the conclusion that it wasn't worth it.

When Vista came out, again it didn't seem worth it.

Now a few years have gone by and I'm still using XP Pro 32bit.

I do the odd bit of gaming (At the moment Storm of Zehir) and use Par2s and Rars a fair amount from usenet. I also tend to have a lot of things running at once and I like things to be snappy when I switch between them.

Sadly I struggled to find a direct comparison between XP 32bit and Vista 64bit that wasn't out of date, so I'm struggling to draw any conclusions.

Does anyone have an opinion if it's worth switching over?
 
Memory is crazy cheap so if you have lots of things running at once Vista x64 would allow you to use 4/8 Gig.
 
Hmm, memory is probably something I couldn't easily improve on. My system is pretty much as good as it can get without throwing most things out... Opteron 185, 2GB Mushkin Redline.

Edit : Scratch that. I had a look at Mushkins site and it seems 4x1GB will run fine, although I may need to drop to 2T. Sadly they had none in stock. A google search turned up a price of 57 quid for a pair of them, turned out to be from the US, but P&P was only 8 quid. So I've ordered another 2GB.

I guess that means I'm going to Vista 64 :)
 
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As long as you have 4Gb RAM go with 64bit.

You may not be able to find any recent comparisons, but the reason is most hardware sites have moved to x64 already for their articles. If you look at the major hadware sites every benchmark of software and hardware they do is always on Vista x64 SP1.
 
4GB Memory Vista doesn't run any smoother than 2GB on XP. Hower with 4GB RAM or more then it probably is worth moving over to Vista x64 as your main OS, though you should probably dual boot with XP for compatability's sake.
 
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