Questions: 32bit/64bit and Vista/XP

Hey guys, two questions for you

1. What's the main difference between getting Vista Home Premium 32 bit vs 64 bit? I'm looking at the HP Pavilion dv5t in particular but I'm not sure that matters if the issue is just OS-related. I could buy the same notebook with either 32bit or 64bit and the price doesn't change at all. Is one strictly better? Why am I given the choice between the two with no price difference?

2. If I buy a notebook from some major brand like Dell, HP, Gateway etc and it comes with preinstalled Vista and some bloatware, I heard there's a "clean install" option that basically reinstalls Vista without the bloatware. Is it possible to just remove Vista and use my XP Pro CDs instead? Is this not recommended for hardware compatibility reasons or any other reasons? Anything else I should be aware of before trying this? Basically, I've never used Vista before, and though I don't really care for all the anti-vista crap that a lot of people are spouting, I'm very comfortable with XP and would like to stay with it if it's an option, just for convenience.

 

32 bit limits u to 3.2gb of ram 64 bit has a limit of 6.5. get 64 bit for more future proof ability. go for a gateway they have no bloatware dell and hp come with alot. I know I have an m1730 XD. Get vista. vista is now faster smoother and nice looking then xp. make sure u get atleast 2 gigs of ram with vista though.

 

You know, these questions have been asked quite a few times before. You may consider using the nifty search feature that's on every part of this forum.

 

Yeah, honestly. Try and find the answer yourself before asking. Bet you'll find what you're looking for.

 

1. The main difference is that 32-bit can only address up to ~3.2 GB while 64-bit has no (attainable) limit.

2. You can always install XP over Vista as long as you have the XP disks. However, if you have no compelling reason to do so, I suggest you stick with Vista (hardware compatiblility is not an issue). If you're hesistant about using Vista, you can always dual-boot with XP until you're familiar enough with Vista to use it as your only OS.

64-bit can address up to 17,000,000,000 GB.

I'd stay away from Gateway, they have poor quality laptops. Both Dell and HP are much better and the bloatware can easily be removed with a clean install. There are many guides here on NBR on how to do it.

 

@ jellybeans and crash, thanks for the nice info, appreciate it. +rep
@ pitabred and cynic, sorry for putting an UNBEARABLE load on your forums with my 2 posts here. unfortunately i've somehow conned you two into putting up your posts, DOUBLING THE LOAD OMG.

Anyways.

So basically I may as well get the 64bit Vista seeing how there's no real downside and no additional cost. As for the Vista/XP situation I guess I'll just try the clean install first and see how I feel with Vista. I'm sure I'll be fine anyways.

Thanks again

 

LOL joolz im with you, I hate when people cry and complain about an extra thread/couple extra posts... it drives them crazy :O

anyways, I'm in the same boat as you. I as well think will be trying out vista and doing the clean install with NOTHING not needed on it. But I heard with XP, these new machines run so much snappier and smoother...

 

Glad to help!

And I think you'll find that Vista will grow on you pretty quickly. At first I was a little apprehensive using it (probably because of all the bad press), but after a few weeks I loved it. Now I'm just waiting for theultimatesteal to have the Vista Ultimate Upgrade available (Sept 8) for $65 so I can upgrade to Ultimate 64-bit!

 

People have their favorites and only you can choose. It's all good but XP is going out the window (pardon the pun). If you're going to get a new laptop get Vista Ultimate x64. Lots of retailers are making this the standard OS.

 

Some programs won't install or run on Vista x64. Some hardware devices won't have drivers for Vista x64. So be aware that you might have compatibility problems using Vista or XP x64.

Others have mentioned the ability to use over 3.2 GB of RAM with Windows x64. That said, 32-bit applications (the vast majority) are still limited in how much memory they can access though this is unlikely to be a problem.

There are additional architectural advantages to using x64. The x64 architecture provides eight additional general purpose registers and eight additional SSE (multimedia) registers. The x86 architecture suffers from register pressure so that intensive software routines frequently have to shuffle data to and from the stack. Eight additional registers means that less of this work has to be done reducing memory accesses which are typically slow operations. The eight additional SSE (also known as SIMD) registers can improve performance for programs that take advantage of the vector instructions in modern x86 processors. And integers are 64-bits instead of 32-bits so programs that need to do 64-bit integer arithmetic can have a performance advantage as it's cheaper to do it in discrete instructions instead of synthetic instructions using 32-bit registers. Note that these architectural improvements only apply to native x64 applications and to the operating system which is a native x64 application.

 

Please read this article:
http://zone.ni.com/devzone/cda/tut/p/id/5709

Benchmarks dated February 2008:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=1354

Benchmarks dated April 2008:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,2845,2280808,00.asp

And no, it's not true that Vista 32-bit can use only 3.2 GB, according to a Microsoft Software Test Engineer, the range is from 2.75 to 3.5 GB. And on this forum, we have seen at least 2 people with as much as 3.75 GB. It really depends on your hardware/bios/chipset combination. If you're not sure which version to use, I suggest you to stick with 32-bit.

 

Yes it's a range but saying 3.2 is a decent estimate. The limitation actually goes back to VMS which has a 2 GB limit, the upper 2 GB of address space being used for system space.

Your first article is now incorrect on mobile chipsets. HP's complete performance business mobile line supports 8 GB of RAM. And many of their midrange business mobile products support 8 GB of RAM.

 

That article was written before the 4 GB DDR2 sodimm became available, and even Intel hasn't updated their product sheet for the PM965 chipset either.

 

Can someone tell me how I can check to see how much RAM my operating system actually recognizes? (I am using Windows XP).

Thanks.

 

Right-click on your taskbar -> Task Manager -> Performance

Under Physical Memory (K)

 

You can use more than 4 GB of RAM on Win32 systems in a roundabout way. On desktops, there are hardware ramdisks, and you can just toss your paging file there (not sure if there are still swap files) for better performance where you have a lot of applications running simultaneously. I know that these come in 4 GB units and that 8 GB units were announced. It might be possible to jury-rig some of this hardware for notebook use.