64bit versus 32 bit

See attached WEI for my work PC. I am sure the hardware will work fine with 64bit. But in a work environment running apps such as Office 2007, Crystal Reports, ArcMap and connected to an Exchange server...would I gain anything by running Win7 64 versus Win7 32????

With RAM very cheap, if I increase RAM to 8GB would the above mentioned run as fast or faster in 64bit?

Thanks for any advice.

jjw
ND

I don't believe you will see a noticeable speed increase with business apps. They'll likely be 32bit apps anyway and even if there were 64 bit versions of those apps, I doubt you'll be dealing with 4GB data in memory for one app. The only thing you will be able to gain with 64 bit Windows (right now anyway) is the ability for the computer to address more that 4GB of RAM which will allow you to have more apps running in physical memory concurrently without Windows swapping them out to the hard drive (much). I think Vista and Windows 7 will still swap somethings out of physical memory even if you have the physical memory to spare. Your Mileage My Vary

Even though the Apps might be 32 bit, wouldn't the overall OS run smoother at 64bit?

When I installed Vista, I didn't even think about it, I loaded the 64 bit version. 64bit will get you to see the full 8GB, but I don't think it will use the extra ram at all. I would say load the 64 bit version. And may I ask where you are getting Win7 64?

Well you won't really need 8GB, so I dunno, as with 32bit you can only use 3.6GB of RAM. Installing 32bit OS on any system with more RAM than that is wasting it.