Win 7 64 or 32 bit for my system?

[MidoBan]

Hi these are my system specs:

Mobo: Gigabyte G31M-S2C
CPU: Intel Pentium 4 650 3.40GHz
RAM: 4GB DDR2

I'm still using xp, and thinking of moving to win 7. my cpu supports 64bit but i figured you guys can tell me if i should install 64 or 32. or maybe i should even stay with xp? i'm gonna be using the computer mainly for making music (cubase, protools and etc..) with a firewire audio interface.

Thank you!

 

[clarkjd]

Win 7 64-bit

 

[das_stig]

+1 64-bit will let you use all of your 4GB of memory.

 

[4745454b]

Double check your programs however and make sure they support win7 64bit.

 

[sminlal]

The only way to use all of your 4GB of RAM is to use the 64-bit version of Windows. For a system that has 4GB or more or RAM now, or if there's a possibility of expanding RAM to that capacity in the future, 64-bit is the way to go.

 

[legendkiller]

I prefer 32-Bit version because it reads a max of 4GB so it doesn't really matters if you got 4GB... I would not recommend getting 64-Bit because you'll lag with that processor at 100% most of the time... It'll probably idle at 5-20% and when you open a program, it'll jump to 100% for the next few second until the program is opened up and firefox well take you a long of 4-6 sec and on a 32-bit system well get you around 2-3 sec to open with that 1 core and 2 threads... Remember that Threads are not like cores as it goes into one core... If you do install 64-Bit system, use it for surfing and Microsoft Office than you should be good but 32-Bit get you a lot farther like playing a game on facebook like farmville and it well load about 7 sec faster...

 

[4745454b]

^ ???

 

[sminlal]

I would not recommend getting 64-Bit because you'll lag with that processor at 100% most of the time...

...this doesn't really make any sense to me at all. Running in 64-bit mode really isn't any slower than 32-bit mode, and it lets you get at the ~500MB of address space normally mapped by the video card in a 4GB system.

 

[geofelt]

I prefer 32-Bit version because it reads a max of 4GB so it doesn't really matters if you got 4GB... I would not recommend getting 64-Bit because you'll lag with that processor at 100% most of the time... It'll probably idle at 5-20% and when you open a program, it'll jump to 100% for the next few second until the program is opened up and firefox well take you a long of 4-6 sec and on a 32-bit system well get you around 2-3 sec to open with that 1 core and 2 threads... Remember that Threads are not like cores as it goes into one core... If you do install 64-Bit system, use it for surfing and Microsoft Office than you should be good but 32-Bit get you a lot farther like playing a game on facebook like farmville and it well load about 7 sec faster...

Baloney.

True enough that most programs will not use more than 2gb. But if you multitask at all you can hold more of them in ram with 4gb than with the 3.3gb or so that you will get with the 32 bit version.

64 bit is also a more secure os than the 32 bit version.

The extra available ram allows windows to cache more in anticipation of reuse.

The main limitation of 64 bit is the inability to run old 16 bit dos programs.