Windows 7: windows 7 32bit or 64?

Two years from now, we won't be having this discussion.



"What?! You only have 4 GB of memory? What programs can you run on your machine?"

It's not a matter of XP, Vista, Windows 7, MacOS, or Linux or whatever. 32-bit is limited by the Laws of Physics and math to 4Gb (2^32 = 4,294,967,296), although you will not see the full 4Gb due to overhead - typically you will see between 2.8 and 3.5Gb, depending on your graphics card and how it "shares" your RAM.

Maybe once or twice, as did I in my first post above, and as SURF alluded to with his 7 year old printer example. But to reiterate, if you want to move to 64-bit, make sure 64-bit drivers for all your hardware devices are available first.

You've got a point there. Depends on what you do, I suppose. For me, I use the map editor for Half-Life 2. When you get to loading a ton of different textures, etc, it's nice to have all the memory you can get. I'm glad I have the room to upgrade if I so desire.

I've been using 64-Bit for about a year. I haven't had any issues that I can recall, so I'd recommend it. But all in all, I suppose there's no real push for average every-day user to use anything other than 32 at the moment. Is there?

Two years from now our systems could be obsolete...so do we wait two years?

Two years we WILL be having these discussions - perhaps even 4 years from now. Look how long the floppy has lingered on. SATA drives have been around for years and still most new motherboards come with EIDE (PATA) connectors.

Understand 64-bit is nothing new - 64-bit XP has been around for 7 years!

64-bit Linux has been around longer.

I'm running 7 with 2gb atm and it runs fine even with 4gb u will only use 2.4gb I have never seen it go over 3gb off ram, as for the speed difference you cant really notice it unless you are playing games.