Vista 32/64?

is it better for me to get a 32 bit vista or 64 bit and why? thx

 

What is your machine's specs?

I'd say go for 64-bit. I haven't had any issues, and at least to me I think it runs faster than 32, but that's up to the user I guess.

But if you ever intend to go up to 4GB, you gotta go 64.

Hope I helped.

 

thx.im getting a dual 8800GTX sli and quad core Q6700

 

Get your hands on the drivers for 64-bit Vista before wiping the disc and finding out that you're screwed.

EDIT: http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x64_163.75.html

 

Someone's doing some big spending .

 

Then I imagine your going for at least 3GB of RAM. Go for the 64bit. But take previous posters advice and try to find all of the 64bit drivers(mostly from manufacturer's site) first.

 

For drivers to be signed as vista certified, there has to be a 32 bit AND a 64 bit version.

So yeah, driver support is there mostly. How reliable or stable they are is another question.

Very few games in mind (Supreme Commander/ Company of Heros) would SERIOUSLY benefit from 64 bit OS. The overhead is just too much of a FPS hit IMO.

 

Also, compatibilty with software may or may not be appealing. At the time i'm typing out this post, some critical software may still have no support for 64bit OSes. But generally it's way better than XP x64 when it came out a few years ago It's sort of a hit and miss scenario.

 

listen to all of the above. they give good advise. My laptop came w/ vista prem 32 bit. Love it. upgraded to vista Ultimate, not sure i use the new features that much.

but, as a result, upgraded my Dell desktop to vista 64bit. Had BIG problems installing. They don't tell you b4 you go to install that my Bios did not support 4GB RAM w/ 64bit version. ran fine in 32bit, cause it didn't read all the RAM. Plus the SATA drivers did not like 64bit and I had to burn the 64bit sata drvs to disk and insert the CD during the install routine. Read the forums throughly conecrning your brand/model b4 upgrading to 64Bit vista. Not everyone has problems, but they are out there.

Some of my software runs a tad slower. I haven't really had any trouble finding drivers. But thats for my desktop and Dell is pretty good about keeping up with them. But I had no sound. Soundblaster X-Fi Xtreme music- they had the wrong driver on the dell site. So as everyone says, be prepared.

 

I'm curious which software you are referring to? Most 32bit software will work just fine on 64bit Vista, there is often no need for a specific 64bit version. The only exceptions are drivers and software that integrates with the explorer, like on the right-click menu.

 

Some critical softwares (for the user finding it critical) such as antivirus or firewalls,extensions and probably drivers.

I admit i'm not very clear in stating the software. For me, the critical application is my power management system, RMClock which is not working due to driver incompatibilites

 

I would say that if you have 4+ Gb of RAM (or plan to get it in very near time), certainly install 64-bit. Because its the only way to actually use such amount of RAM, and its big enough amount so more memory-hungry x64 (see below) will not matter.

If you have up to 3Gb of RAM, certainly use 32-bit

Compatibility is not a big problem already, since almost all drivers are made for x64. But, still there are some quirks yet left. So if you dont need it for sure - why to create unneded problems, even minor ones?
But most importantly, 64-bit Windows editions are significantly more memory-hungry. First, because most of 64-bit modules have less sparse code of bigger average size. And second, because 64-bit OS have to keep *both* 32-bit and 64-bit versions of almost all system DLLs for current usage scenarios - that can almost double the amount of RAM eaten by system DLLs.

Performance wise I would say it almost the same (when there is no RAM shortage of course).
Sometimes x64 slightly faster, sometimes x32 is slightly faster. But I would say it not so big differrence to take into account.

 

What?
That makes no sense. I'll admit I'm not currently running a 64-bit OS, so I can't check for myself, but:
The code size is pretty much unaffected. (In fact, most tests I've seen show it to be slightly smaller, because while some instructions become one byte longer, a lot of instructions can also be removed entirely)
So code size doesn't grow. In-memory data size is unaffected if it's a 32-bit application, and may grow slightly if it's a 64-bit app (because memory addresses are longer, so pointers to these have to store more data), but again, not a big deal.

As for the final bit, it's not a major issue. Not that much RAM is used by the dll's themselves (they're typically 500kb or so each), and everything on top of that is per-application anyway, so each application gets its own copy *regardless* of 64/32 bit issues.
So unless someone can show me hard evidence to the contrary, I'd say there's no significant difference in memory usage.

 

Well, on my 2Gb rig Vista x64 uses 500+ Mb for me right after boot.
Vista x32 - about 300+ Mb

I've tried to run VMWare with 2Gb virtual machine and noticed significantly more swapping in x64, so its defenitely leaves less useful memory.

Truly most growth is not due to code size, but due to DLLs issue. 64-bit application can not use 32-bit DLL and vice versa.
So 64-bit applications usually maps the set of most used system dlls from 64-bit set. 32-bit applications map most used system dlls from 32-bit set. So these "core DLLs" are loaded rougly twice. It would become better in the future when most software will migrate to the x64, but now it not the case.

Btw, check the 64 bit programs/dlls from Vista versus analogs in 32 bit edition, you'll see difference in size. Though not very big(again this is not major memory issue, need to keep 32-bit libraries loaded for compatibility is the major one). I guess the fact that almost all constants in code grow from 4 bytes to 8 bytes (not one byte as you claim) makes most of impact (usual code is riddled with constant values everywhere).

But take note I also said that on 4+Gb system where x64 makes sence this increase of memory usage pretty much does not matter.