Dear Puter Experts,

I have a new PC running Vista Home Prem 64 Bit (Pre-installed).

Other information:

PC Model: Acer Aspire X3200 Desktop
Processor: AMD Phenom 8550 Triple Core 2.20Ghz
RAM: 3.0Gb
Display Adaptor: NVIDIA GeForce 9200

I also have my own full copy of Vista Home Premium 32 Bit.

I am considering downgrading from the 64 Bit to the 32 Bit Version. One reason for this is that I have 32 Bit version programs etc, which are not compatible with the 64 Bit version and there are no 64 Bit compatible versions available.

My questions are:

(1) If I downsize from 64 to 32 is it likely to cause problems?

(2) What are the advantages of 64 Bit over 32 Bit?

(3) I read somewhere that because of the high RAM etc, of my PC it is likely that I will not be able to use all the power my new PC has. Is this correct?

Any help with this will be greatly appreciated.

Regards

John
(Poseidon)

You can install 32 on the system

32bit will recognize 3.2gb ram if you have 4gb installed (only 3.2 gb for 32 bit systems)
-64bit system can use the whole 4gb of memory


64 bit computers process data in larger chunks than 32 bit computers. This means a number of things, but the big 2 are:

1) When programs are written to support 64-bit processors, those programs will generally perform faster than on a 32-bit processor of the same speed. This is partially because 32-bit computers must handle 64-bit numbers in two steps, whereas 64-bit computers only need to use one step.

2) 64-bit processors can address more memory than 32-bit processors. This means your server can have more RAM, and therefore can store more data in memory, making memory-intensive programs like databases faster.

Can find more inof about differences with Google

For seahwk83,

Thank you for your excellent reply. It was very easy to understand

I am assuming that as I only have 3.00gb RAM a 32 Bit OS will recognise and use the whole of it although data will be processed more slowly.

How much more slowly are we talking about?

Kind rgads,

John

You will not notice any slowness with 3gb RAM