Whats the diferrence of windows 7 ultimate 32bit and 64 bit?

[shenan93]

bit?.....my version of windows is 32 bit how can i upgrade it to 64 bit?

 

[mi1ez]

In order to "upgrade" it would need to be a clean install as the in-place upgrade doesn't work changing 32-64

 

[mi1ez]

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/32-bit-and-64-bit-Windows-frequently-asked-questions

 

[WR2]

Hello shenan93;
Did your system come with pre-installed Win7 32? Or did you do an upgrade yourself?
Do you by chance have a 64bit upgrade disk already?

 

[WR2]

You didn't mention your reason for upgrading. What are your plans?

 

[shenan93]

well im planning to buy a new graphics card....
and i dont know wther upgrading to 64 bit ,will increse my gaming performance

does it give a better performance?? if so hv a idea of upgrading


and what is the difference of 32 bit and 64 bit???

 

[WR2]

The only major difference is the ability of 64bit to use more than 4GB of RAM and run 64bit specific programs (fairly rare that there isnt also a 32bit version).

A 32bit OS can only address 4GB of memory addresses and if you have 4GB of RAM installed you usually have less than that available since the system will reserve some address space for use by the hardware. You might see 3.5GB as 'available'.
That is annoying, but all by itself it won't affect overall performance.
And because of that it's probably not necessary to go through the complete overhaul a 32bit to 64bit install needs.
Having a 32bit OS will not limit your ability to do a video card upgrade.

 

[amnotanoobie]

There would little to no performance increase when it comes to gaming. Heck, I haven't even seen a 64-bit game on the PC yet.

Most of the games today are still 32-bit applications.

 

[clarkjd]

The only major difference is the ability of 64bit to use more than 4GB of RAM and run 64bit specific programs (fairly rare that there isnt also a 32bit version).

A 32bit OS can only address 4GB of memory addresses and if you have 4GB of RAM installed you usually have less than that available since the system will reserve some address space for use by the hardware. You might see 3.5GB as 'available'.
That is annoying, but all by itself it won't affect overall performance.
And because of that it's probably not necessary to go through the complete overhaul a 32bit to 64bit install needs.
Having a 32bit OS will not limit your ability to do a video card upgrade.

The main advantage of the 64-bit is that if you have on of those video cards with 1 GB(or more) of ram, and you had 4GB of system Ram, then you would have the use of all 4 gb of system ram. the 32 bit OS would use less than 3 gb of that 4 available!

 

[WR2]

The main advantage of the 64-bit is that if you have on of those video cards with 1 GB(or more) of ram, and you had 4GB of system Ram, then you would have the use of all 4 gb of system ram. the 32 bit OS would use less than 3 gb of that 4 available!

Actually it doesn't work out that way. VRAM is not mapped into system RAM on a 1-for-1 basis.
Here is a Device Manage screenshot of system memory address space allocation for 2 GTX 280 (1GB VRAM each).

 

[amnotanoobie]

Actually it doesn't work out that way. VRAM is not mapped into system RAM on a 1-for-1 basis.
Here is a Device Manage screenshot of system memory address space allocation for 2 GTX 280 (1GB VRAM each).
http://img208.imageshack.us/img208/9098/imagethumb12.png

I think they tried 1-1 mapping with Windows Vista, or was it just shadowing the vram in main memory, couldn't quite remember.