Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room

install win7 32 or 64 bit on a 4 gig ram machine - opinions, please.

(1/9) > >>

nudone:
i'm about to put win7 on my vista machine (within the next few days). the motherboard will only support 4 gig of ram and it's an Athlon 64 x2 4800 chip.

if i could get more ram into it i'd put win7 64 on. as i can't, and as i've read that 32 bit applications can run a bit slower on a 64 setup, i'm wondering if i should just stick to a 32 bit system.

the question is really: has anyone noticed any kind of performance difference with these 32 bit applications running under a 64 bit O/S. if it's not a very obvious difference, i.e. no pauses or weird glitches then i don't consider it a problem. i appreciate a faster machine will show less slow down - because of its age, i think my machine would, probably, be less capable of hiding any performance differences.

(i doubt i've got any 16 bit stuff so that isn't an issue.)

Deozaan:
I'd make sure all of your hardware has 64-bit drivers, and that they've been signed, at least if you intend on using it. I can't use my onboard LAN adapter because the 64-bit drivers haven't been signed and Windows 7 won't let me install unsigned drivers.

I'll let others with more technical knowledge answer the questions with regard to 32-bit software speeds on a 64-bit OS.

nudone:
oh, yes. good point. never thought about 64 bit drivers. i don't really want to start upgrading hardware because of that.

f0dder:
The only 32bit program I've noticed running slower on 64bit Windows was Foxit Reader - complex PDFs rendered extremely slow, so slow that it was actually faster to render them running a 32bit OS under vmware. That was a while ago, so the problem might have been fixed, and it might have been specific to 64bit XP - I'm pretty sure it was related to GDI+. Don't have any complex PDFs lying around now, so can't test with recent Foxit + win7.

Other than that, you've already mentioned the 16-bit issue yourself. It's not only an issue with applications themselves, some 32bit apps have 16bit installshieldcrap installers. Luckily that's only really for old old versions of software.

There's drivers, which can be a problem with old hardware, but the situation is much better with vista and win7 than it was with 64bit xp.

The issue you'd be most likely to run into is shell extensions - 64bit explorer requires 64bit versions of shell extensions. Personally I stick with 32bit xplorer2 even though I run a 64bit OS, and that works like a charm.

daddydave:
I went from Vista 32 bit with 1GB RAM to Windows 7 64 bit to 8GB RAM, and I went with the 64 bit version solely because of the opportunity to have enough RAM not to have to worry about RAM anymore.

Between the 32bit and 64bit apps on my system, I don't notice any speed difference, and certainly not "pauses or weird glitches."

I started to say there is not much of an advantage to going to 64-bit on a 4GB system, but on a 4GB system, I think 64 bit would see the full 4GB vs 32 bit only seeing 3GB, so it might actually be worthwhile.

By the way, DO check all of your drivers, including the chipset drivers for your motherboard and Google what others say about running Windows 7 64 bit on your motherboard (or off the shelf system if that's what you have.) Vista 64 bit DID allow 64 bit unsigned kernel mode drivers, Windows 7 64 bit DOES NOT. In fact, Google every piece of hardware you have because I'm not seeing a trial version of Windows 7 64-bit except for one that runs in a VM, and that won't help as far as testing drivers.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page