Windows 7: Windows 7 64bit or 32bit on old Laptop

I am new to this forum and looking for some opinions. I recently built a new desktop and installed Win 7 64bit and it was a walk in the park. So now I am going to upgrade the wife's laptop. It is a HP Pavilion zv6270us. It has a Athlon 64 3500+ at 2.0GHz with 2GB DDR PC2700 Cl 2.5 333mhz memory. I dual booted Win 7 RC 64bit to test and had a few driver problems since HP won't support this unit for Win 7. I was able to use some Vista drivers with a hack to get the sound working. Only thing not working is the Fax Modem which I never use. We use the laptop for E-Mail, Web browsing and wife is addicted to "Bejeweled 2" which runs fine under Win 7 64.
I was thinking of installing Win 7 32bit and wondering if 64bit was worth the effort as far as bootup time and performance. I was thinking 32bit might have better drivers and might even perform better.
All opinions welcome and thanks in advance.

Jim

Hello Jim, Welcome!

I would strongly recommend using the 32 bit version. Besides having better driver compatibility, it uses less resources. It is misunderstood that 64-bit is faster. Long story!

The only reason to go x64 is if you have 4GB or more of RAM. 32-bit cannot address more than 4GB, but in practice, it will only address about 3.5GB.

I'd just slap in x86 if it makes drivers a whole lot easier... :)

Hey jim, i would recogment the 32-bit, as i was in the saem situation. i Did that and have never looked back :)