Help with Dell Studio 1537

I recently purchased a Dell Studio 1537 with the following configuration:

Intel® Core 2 Duo T6600 (2.20 GHz/800 MHz FSB/2 MB L2 cache)
3GB Shared Dual Channel DDR2 800MHz
Bright, glossy widescreen 15.4 WLED display (1280×800)
256MB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3450
320GB SATA Hard Drive (5400RPM)
8X Slot Load Dual Layer DVD±RW drive
Intel WiFi Link 5100 802.11 A/G/N Half Mini-Card
Integrated 2.0M Pixel Webcam
56 Whr Lithium Ion Battery (6 cell)
Dell Wireless 370 Bluetooth Internal (2.1)

It shipped with Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit, and I am wondering if it would be worth my time to move this system to a 64-bit version of Windows Vista (either Home Premium and use the product key located on the bottom of my computer, or Ultimate using another license which I already own). I do have the 64-bit media available to me as well.

There's numerous reasons why I am wondering, the biggest being MacroOp Fusion being disabled in EM64T long mode, will this incur a performance penalty on the Core 2 Duo T6600 with 3 GB of RAM? Is it worth moving to 64-bit with only 3GB of RAM in the system?

I've already Google'd the heck out of this topic and searched the forums, but most are suggesting that if you have a 64-bit processor and 4 GB of RAM that it's worth it, but what about 3 GB of RAM?

Thanks for your help!

 

Bump... anyone?

 

It probably won't make a huge difference either way.

 

Moving from 32-bit to 64-bit operating system if your processor supports it is pretty much always worth it, in my opinion, unless you run a lot of 16-bit legacy applications, since that's no longer supported in 64-bit Vista.

I recently made the move from Vista Home Premium 32-bit to 64-bit, and if anything, I've noticed nothing but improvements in performance. 64-bit native programs run beautifully, and 32-bit native apps run just as well as they did before.

32-bit systems are going to start getting outdated sooner or later. While it's not really an issue now (unless you have 4GB or more RAM), 32-bit won't last forever. And you're going to get more than those 3GB of RAM sooner or later.

I say go for it, you really have nothing to lose.

 

Looks like you are always right.
I'm with 3 Gb ram and DELL OEM Vista Ultimate SP 2 x64 - work like a charm.
Fast and Stable.
(some minor driver problems but the driver in this case are my same for x86 and x64;Some "new" drivers like Lan Driver has bugs;Some old too has bugs; Dell sometimes made crap drivers... not OS)
So when question comes to System Vista X64 is perfect in every case!

We already had ram discussion - I guarantee you with 3 GB you will NOT have problem and the difference between 3 Gb and 4 GB is very slight for office work.
Last night I played Wheelman with Vin Diezel:This beast require::

Microsoft® Windows® XP SP2/Vista
CPU Core 2 Duo 2 Ghrz
2 GB Ram
9 GB HD Space
3D-video 512 MB, DirectX® 9.0c (NVidia GeForce 7900 or ATI Radeon x1950)
Audio DirectX® 9.0с


The game was smooth on 1027x768; on 1440x900 it was slow but Ati Radeon 3450 is lowend card!

By the way Vista detects your OS key based on BIOS.Every Dell's computer has DELL OEM BIOS - so you no need new key or license.
Only new Vista X64 version.

 

Will I be seeing a difference in battery life or performance under 64-bit? Most of my programs are 32-bit, but I am planning on running a virtual machine for testing purposes as well. One thing that also concerns me is Macro-Op Fusion being disabled in EM64T mode, will that be an issue?

 

bump curious about this as well

 

Battery life is not affected by the difference between 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems, and performance with 32-bit applications will not be any different.

As for Macro-Op Fusion...I don't even know what that is.

 

"Additionally, as Figure 4 indicates, the Intel Core front-end introduces a new feature that is referred to as macro-op fusion. Within Intel, x86 instructions are called macro-ops, while the internal instructions are called uops. Macro-op fusion lets the decoders combine two macro instructions into a single uop. Specifically, x86 compare or test instructions are fused with x86 jumps to produce a single uop and any decoder can perform this optimization. Only one macro-op fusion can be performed each cycle, so the maximum decode bandwidth is really 4+1 x86 instructions per cycle. Macro-op fusion maps particularly well to the familiar if-then-else statement, which is a very common programming construct. Although Intel declined to comment, some estimates indicate that macro-op fusion can reduce the number of uops by 10%.

The benefits of macro-op fusion are readily apparent. Reducing the number of uops improves performance in two ways. The first is that fewer instructions are executed, which directly increases performance. Secondly, out-of-order execution becomes more effective since the out-of-order scheduling window can effectively examine more of the program at once and find more instruction level parallelism (ILP). Of course, these benefits are very similar to those from uop fusion, but improving a different class of instructions. Perhaps the most ironic part is that in some ways, macro-op and uop fusion are really making x86 MPUs interally more CISC-like, and less RISC-like."

http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT030906143144&p=4

Any thoughts?