I got my 64 bit lappy a toshiba from Best buy with 4 gigs ddr2. and was only 999. it comapres nicely to the upper end systems, gaming and such rocks..

I would never go back to 32bit. In fact, I just put Vista64 on my laptop as well.

The only drawback: Cisco doesn't have a 64bit compatible VPN-client.

hey Kiddo good to see ya

I dont like being the microft basher du jour, but ...

I should point out - for the sake of fairness - that looking at the main consumer operating systems, its only Windows (and only consumer/workstation versions of it) that has issues with 4GB+ total ram on 32-bit.

Macs have been on 64-bit for a while now, ofc.

Linux, can work with up to 64GB of ram on 32-bit. Although PAE is necessary for a process to be able to access an address range greater than 4GB, most things that might need to do so, do - for example Sun's xVM products.

XP/Vista's 3.3GB 32-bit limit is NOT a limit with 32-bit OSes, but a limit caused by 20 years of accumulated bad-design-decision cruft, and their decision to turn said cruft into a marketing ploy.
Implementing in the Vista consumer OS the same tech for large-memory address used by servers (including 32-bit windows servers) would have meant drivers needing to be rewritten, but oh wait, they had to do that aaanyway

And if you ask "why a marketing ploy", that's because when memory ranges are the same, the advantage of 64-bit is actually pretty negligible, apart from a very small number of applications.
With current compilers, the applications that can actually make use of all those extra parallel maths operations is pretty tiny, meaning your only real advantage is the extra registers. If anything, the performance gap between 32-bit and 64-bit is shrinking.

Whenever I upgrade my desktop, I will definitely go with a 64-bit system this time.

I haven't reached the point where I see myself needing more than 4G of Ram... I'm sure the day will come, but it hasn't yet.

What to do with your old XP Home system?  Toss some extra hard drives in the sucker, stick it in a corner somewhere and use it as a home fileserver.

i switched to vista 64bit from windows XP 64bit (actually 2003 server kernel). 64bit has been around for so many years, and is so much better.

I might give it a spin at some point, but Vista has just so thoroughly annoyed me (Ever tried getting explorer to save the folder view/window settings for ALL folders? Don't...) when I've tried it that it probably won't happen until Windows7, if they fix some of their moronic design descisions. If they can pull it out in two years, I'll probably be in for a new machine by then.

I do have access to XP64, but I don't really feel like dealing with that support mess. So for now, I'll stick to XP32 and gladly stomach the loss of 512MB out of my 4GB to my video card's allocation. My old machine only had 1GB anyway

i've been running vista ultimate64 since the week vista was released and haven't regretted a second of it. there were some issues with drivers for my HP laser printer for the first 3 or 4 weeks but that's the only hardware issue i had. i really enjoy having 8 gigs of ram, too!

zoomba, i've been using nod32 since i got vista. version 3 does run on vista64. i'm perplexed as to why it won't work on your system.

There are 64-bit versions of many of Stardock's most popular programs including WindowBlinds.

Here's my twopennies worth on the subject... I've been using 64bit since MS released XP Professional x64 and was lucky enough to beta-test Vista from Beta2 though to release and I, for one, wouldn't dream of going back to a 32bit OS, (seems a bit like buying a ZX Spectrum and hoping it'll run the new generation of apps and games), sure, Vista in both x32 and x64 got some deserved bad press from a premature release, but Vista now bears no resemblance (under the bonnet) to the "ugly stick" that was released back in January 2007. 64bit apps and games are becoming more mainstream which shows that after a slow start, the major software producers have now adopted the platform and seen it as the way forward. Autodesk, Corel, Ahead, Eset, McAfee amd most of the major players now have either native 64bit support in the latest version of their software or a 64bit version of their software available. All this, and remember, the majority of 32bit software will still run on Vista.

"The King is Dead. Long live the King!"

Regards to all, Peter

I'd never go back to 32-bit, I have a 9800 GX2 that has 1GB of memory along with 4GB of system memory. If I go to 32-bit my OS will only use a total of 3GB out of 4GB. Not to mention I run a Quad-Core system which isn't fully taken advantage of in 32-bit.

Yup and im lovin it. I dont know the full list tho, where can we find one? Also is there a list of those not currently 64 bit, that will be brought in to 64 bit compatibilty?

I was under the impression that the latest service pack for Vista 32 allowed the OS to fully utilise my 4GB of RAM, I am wrong I take it?