Vista 64-bit 3gb or ram?

I have been reading a lot of the information here and it was extremely helpful in deciding on a laptop and what upgrades to make. I have read arguments both for and against upgrading from the 32 bit Vista OS to 64 (and both makes sense). Anyway, I recently ordered a T400 with Vista Ultimate 32bit and 3gb or ram. I decided that once the laptop gets here I would do a clean install and upgrade to 64. My question is would a 64bit OS run ok with 3gb or ram or should I wait until I can upgrade it to at least 4gb? Thanks for your help

btw, I just got notified today that it shipped. I ordered it 8/19 and est was always 9/2 (4 cell battery). Although the UPS tracking site said "THE SERVICE SELECTED IS NOT AVAILABLE TO THE DESTINATION ADDRESS / DOWNGRADED, FORWARDED TO CONSIGNEE, SELECTED SERVICE IS NOT AVAILABLE" not sure what thats about but hopefully I'll see it before the 2012 London games.

 

64 bit just means that it will allow you to use 4GB and beyond, not that it needs it. Anywhere that Vista 32 will run, Vista 64 will run. I run 64 bit Ultimate on my media PC which has 2GB RAM + 1GB Readyboost.

 

you should be fine with 3gb

 

An x64 OS will work fine with 3GB RAM, though it might use a bit more of the available RAM in comparison to the non-x64 OS.

 

It will run fine with 3GB RAM. Take note that you should backup the video driver before you upgrade to x64, I dun think the video driver that supports the switchable graphics is downloadable yet.

 

64-bit operating systems will use more memory and 64-bit native programs will use more memory. Sometimes approaching up to twice the memory for the same application. Native 64-bit programs use 64-bit pointers within programs. I'm not sure about Windows but they may also do things like aligning the stack to on quadwords for better 64-bit performance. I was floored when I saw how much memory Vista x64 uses with nothing else running on the system.

One other thing about Windows and extra memory. Windows caches the file system in unused memory so if your machine is on for a long time and you have a lot of unused memory, looking around at your file system or retrieving files will be really fast as the information is cached.

A few years ago, there was a performance penalty to using unmatched sticks of RAM. I'm not sure whether this is true today.

 

If they didn't use 64-bit words and 64-bit registers, what's the point of 64-bit?

Like you said, Vista is now much more aggressive (and efficient) with memory management. In their minds, unused memory is wasted memory, so you will see lots of memory in use when your computer is doing nothing (which it's actually not).

 

"If they didn't use 64-bit words and 64-bit registers, what's the point of 64-bit? "

It can be a massive amount of work porting applications from 32-bits to 64-bits. Microsofts's INT model makes porting a little easier but it is a little more confusing to those familiar with other platforms. ints are 32-bits in VS2005 whether your target is 32-bits or 64-bits. You have to use __int64s or long longs to get 64-bit integers.

Adobe Flash has not been ported for 64-bit even though they've been asked for it for years. Sun Microsystems hasn't ported the small browser plugin piece that allows you to run 64-bit Java on 64-bit browsers.

There are a lot of sophisticated software applications that don't have 64-bit native support. And in most cases, they don't need to as they run fine in 32-bit emulation mode. 64-bit is a nice-to-have in most cases. In some cases you really need it to break the 4 GB barrier or to get the best performance.