did I install the wrong windows?

Hello everyone I've been using windows seven for about a month now, and well I like it a lot, but after looking around I think I may have installed the wrong version.

I'll show you my spec's and what I have and you can let me know if I should change.

I have a AMD Athalon dual core 4850e 2.51GHz
only 1gig of ram (but that will change soon)

and I'm running the 32 bit operating system, should I be using the 64?

If you add more ram as 1 gig is pretty tight for 64 bit, then your all set for 64 bit.

but I mean to say is it worth it? will I notice the difference?

Namelessbond said:

but I mean to say is it worth it? will I notice the difference?

Try Dual booting, section off a partition, install another copy of win7 64 bit, and try it out. Your dual boot options will be setup automatically, and you can test out to see if you like it or not.

Although, with such little RAM, you may be bogged down a bit. 64 bit is much more conservative with system resources, and simotanious tasks, but requries more overhead.

I say give it a try for your setup, although dont get rid of your 32 bit before you give it a test whirl.

Namelessbond said:

will I notice the difference?

The frustration of dealing with incompatible software and drivers will totally outweigh any performance increase (which you will probably not get anyways).

As was said, you really need more RAM to make use of 64-bit Windows. Even then, 32-bit Windows is usually faster.

The only reason I use 64-bit is for Gaming. I play most of my games on 32-bit Windows XP with best speed. But a couple of games do run a tiny bit better in 64-bit.

I avoided 64 bit Win XP Pro and Vista because of the known driver problems and program issues. But now I'm running Win 7 64 bit and I really haven't had a single compatibility issue. Also, I only have 2 GB of RAM but Win 7 rarely goes over 75 to 80% usage. Unless you have some old/oddball hardware or need to run some programs that just refuse to play nice in X64 then I would recommend switching to 64 bit.

antalgebra has the best answer.

You'll need to try 64-bit for yourself to determine if it works for you.

If you're rich, you can buy everything that is 64-bit compatible if it isn't already...

If you're poor like me and have some older hardware and software, 64-bit is just not an option for main operating system. That is why I use dual boot setup and get the best of both worlds (and some extra cash in my pocket).

sup3rsprt said:

The frustration of dealing with incompatible software and drivers will totally outweigh any performance increase (which you will probably not get anyways).

As was said, you really need more RAM to make use of 64-bit Windows. Even then, 32-bit Windows is usually faster.

The only reason I use 64-bit is for Gaming. I play most of my games on 32-bit Windows XP with best speed. But a couple of games do run a tiny bit better in 64-bit.

I've never found an instance where 32 bit was faster than 64 bit. 64 bit is noticeably (both in actual use and in benchmarks) faster on my old laptop even and it only has 2 GB of RAM. I also have had absolutely zero issues with compatibility. Is it as noticeably faster as it is on my new laptop that has 8 GB of RAM? Well, no, of course not, but both laptops run faster with the 64 bit OS than with the 32 bit one.

I couldn't tell any speed difference from x32 to x64, and I've seen benchmarks where the only noticeable difference is with more than 4gb. With 1gb I think you might see a slight decrease in speed because of increased disk and memory requirements of x64.

Also, there are some compatibility problems with x64 (personally, onenote 2007 isn't fully functional, my ti-89 calculator won't connect)

I wouldn't bother the reinstall unless you have 4gb+ of memory (which is dirt cheap at $10/GB).