Users! I have need of knowledge. 32 or 64?

Gawd I wish it was valves, but no, its bits.

Vista, being what it is, is something I have to use on my school issued pc. However, on my machine at home (that hasnt worked in over seven months) I am looking to do up a few things to get it ready and enjoy blasting the shit out of alien lifeforms durin my amazingly long three week summer vacation before class starts again.

My question: long ago in a galaxy youre currently physically sitting in, XP had 32 bit and 64 bit Operating systems. You didnt dare go to 64 back in the day though if you were using your pc for games, as nearly half of them would no longer work...

Is this still the case? Is 64 bit still the cats meow for busin ess and business only?

Danke for your thoughts.

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Kirk Coughlin
Woodbury, MN and River Falls, WI

Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est.

32 bit. No huge benefits to going 64 bit yet. Once more mainstream applications can fully utilize 64 bits or if you have programs that NEED more than 3 gigs to preform adequately stay on the 32 bit side.

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-Jason

Just one example, I have a pretty bad ass Sony Vaio laptop, cost me around $1200, has Vista 64, won't run Richard Burns rally without being a bit glitchy.
Specs:
2.26 Intel Dual Core P8400
250 GB Hard Drive
4 GB Ram

My old PC that I built was back in 2003 for around $1000 ran it fine.
Annoying as fuck.

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Grant Hughes

standard 32-bit XP for gaming, FTW.

Anymore, it seems that the choking point on gaming machines is the system bus, with The Video cards in the 512+ MB range.

--sarge

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---** To be in compliance with the Anarchy **---
Jorden R. Kleier
Baraboo, Wisconsin, USA
1990 Mazdog Protege 4WD
1973

Im running a 3GHz Core 2 duo 64bit. with the vid card i got, gaming is wicked.

Yeah, but what OS (operating system) are you running? Kirk was asking about the OS, rather than the hardware.

--sarge

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---** To be in compliance with the Anarchy **---
Jorden R. Kleier
Baraboo, Wisconsin, USA
1990 Mazdog Protege 4WD
1973

helps if i read.

xp

Any chip from Intel or AMD is going to be 64bit capable, so why not? XP 64bit was a nightmare. As I understand it, it's actually a stripped down version of Server 2003.
No wonder previous drivers did not work and no new drivers were developed. I don't think any of the Vista horror stories I have heard involved specifics to the 64bit version.

p.s. you should buy orange box on steam... 3 games for like $15 now I think...

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Name: Dawud Jackson (DJ)
Age: 30
Location: Seattle, WA
Occupation: Computer dude.

I'm running V64 on a Core2Quad. For normal stuff (like opening and closing programs, intarwebz, etc), it doesn't seen to be any faster than my Vaio Pentium dual-core running V32. I saw some benchmarking crap a little while ago that showed V64 being like 2% faster than V32, and the wankers saids that that showed V64 had clear performance advantage. Whatever.

The downside to V64 is that old-school DOS programs will cease to function, and some more recent software is only available in 32-bit.

As a side note, my computer seems to be crashing a LOT less since I quit running Folding@Home on my GPU.

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Monika Hawkinson
Seattle, WA

V32 vs V64 will not be any different for normal stuff like you described Kevin. The speed of most of those tasks are limited by harddisk or network speed which is independent of the 32 vs. 64 distinction. If you really want to speed those things up you should be looking at a solid state hard disk not OS bit version.

32 v. 64, really only affects the way the OS manages memory address space. So if you have an application that needs more than 2 GB of active pages in memory to function efficiently. These applications are typically things like Databases or some scientific applications.

If you really want to get your geek on, it is really not 64 bit processing like Sun or IBM, which intel calls Itanium. What vista uses is x64 which is basically the standard 32 bit processor commands that have been extended so they can use a 64 memory addressing scheme. This has lots of theoretical advantages because it allows the OS to manage memory in a much more flexible manner. Tru3 64 bit processing uses a 64 bit instruction set that theoretically allows you to create more efficient code that can process big numbers easier. The number of applications that this really matters is very very small and has little to no use for normal computer user.

Well, I got a laptop I bought at a pawnshop for $500. I turn it on and I can type stuff on it. It makes magic pictures on the screen. Pretty colors. And funny noises.

Doivi Clarkinen Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Well, I got a laptop I bought at a pawnshop for
> $500. I turn it on and I can type stuff on it.
> It makes magic pictures of all kinds of naughty girls doing really imaginative and entertaining stuff on the screen. Pretty
> colors. And funny noises.

Fixed.

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John Vanlandingham
Sleezattle, WA, USA

Vive le Prole-le-ralliat

www.rallyrace.net/jvab
CALL +1 206 431-9696
Remember! Pacific Standard Time
is 3 hours behind Eastern Standard Time.

john vanlandingham Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Doivi Clarkinen Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > Well, I got a laptop I bought at a pawnshop
> for
> > $500. I turn it on and I can type stuff on
> it.
> > It makes magic pictures of all kinds of
> naughty girls doing really imaginative and
> entertaining stuff on the screen. Pretty
> > colors. And funny noises.
>
> Fixed.
>


(spits out diet dew) Damn that was pretty good stuff!

Thanks gents for all the feedback. I guess the biggest influence on this decision will be the availability of funds, but I have to say that I will probably stick with 32 for the time being as I have just found out today that two of the programs I need to use for school run a bit.... funky... on 64.

Maybe next time. Oh no, ther'll be another OS or three out by then. lol!

Thank you again for the info!

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Kirk Coughlin
Woodbury, MN and River Falls, WI

Quemadmodum gladius neminem occidit, occidentis telum est.

john vanlandingham Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Doivi Clarkinen Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > Well, I got a laptop I bought at a pawnshop
> for
> > $500. I turn it on and I can type stuff on
> it.
> > It makes magic pictures of all kinds of
> naughty girls doing really imaginative and
> entertaining stuff on the screen. Pretty
> > colors. And funny noises.
>
> Fixed.
>

Dang, I knew I should have cleared my cache! So to speak...