Quick Vista 64-bit Question

Here's an easy one for somebody...

Am I correct in assuming that with 4 gigs of RAM I would not see any difference between 32- and 64-bit OS's? I would need to go beyond 4 gigs to see an improvement, correct? What I have understood is that even with a 64-bit pc and 64-bit drivers, the OS is not worth improving unless giong beyond the 4 gig limitation of a 32-bit OS.

Thank you to whoever responds.

 

Unless you run seriously old 16-bit applications, or you have ancient hardware with no 64-bit driver support, there's really no reason not to get 64-bit.

 

One of many good performance tests:

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/memory/2008/07/08/is-more-memory-better/1

cheers ...

 

Look here- http://support.visioneer.com/products/tools/os/vista_32vs64.asp I used 32 Vista for about a year and a half and when I got this lappy It came with 64. And it seems to be faster and smoother than the 32. 32 will only use 4Gb and 64 can use up to 8Gb but it is ridiculous expensive to get 8. Any way, check th link for a quick explanation.

 

I'm running 64-bit with 2 gb of RAM. I feel like it's a little smoother than when I was running 32-bit... but part of it could be my imagination I guess. In any case it's not a really large difference.

Here are some other pros and cons to 64-bit: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=4239375&postcount=4

If you like to tinker a bit, I say go for it, as long as you have 64-bit drivers for your necessary peripherals... and leave the 32-bit folks in the dust.

If you prefer to simplify your life, then stick with 32-bit, and avoid issues with the occasional device that's still not 64-bit compatible.

 

Actually 64 bit Windows Vista can support upto 128 GB of RAM. Finally the limiting aspect is the hardware.

 

The biggest difference between 32bit and 64bit FOR THE AVERAGE USER is software and driver compatibility. Now of course you plan to run a 16GB database you better have a 64bit OS with more than 16GB of memory so it always depends on what your usage is.

 

Wow! I thought it was higher but I mean for the personal user you will not need to, at this moment at least, go past 8 or even 4 for that matter. Now, where can I get 2 64Gb cards for my laptop. lol

 

It depends what you do - if you do heavy photo editing with large files you may, if you jus edit small word documents you won't. Check my sig for a post I once created on 32Bit vs 64Bit

Its an artificial limit in the code. So in the near future you'll possibly see 64Bit using more RAM - but I doubt anybody will need it, apart from servers and supercomputers.

 

You'll actually see the difference. 64bit Vista will be able to use all 4GB, 32bit will take a bit out of the top part for various hardware addressing needs, so you end up only being able to use between 3.2 and 3.5GB, depending on what kind of hardware you have. For example, even if you have 256MB of dedicated video card RAM, that still comes out of the 4GB of address space for 32bit Vista, so you'd be down to 3.75GB of RAM available maximum, not including OTHER direct memory-mapping hardware (DMA hard drive accesses, other PCIe devices, etc.) Not so with 64bit.

When we're talking theoretical 64bit addressing limits, if you had a full 64bit RAM addressing bus you could use up to 16 exabytes of RAM (16.8 million terabytes, to put some perspective on it). In actuality, current AMD chips have 48bit addressing schemes, which lets them address about 256 terabytes of RAM directly. This is artificially limited to 128GB on Windows, but not on Linux and BSD. But that really only matters if you're working on some serious servers

 

You won't notice significant speed difference between a 64bit or 32bit with 4gb memory since there's also other factors that affect speed such as programs running in the background. And since not too many programs are dedicated 64bit yet it will revert back to 32bit mode anyways. To really take advantage of 64bit all programs and hardwares must be 64bit also.