[poseidon]

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)

[seahwk83]

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

[poseidon]

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

[seahwk83]

You will not notice any slowness with 3gb RAM