whats good about the 64bit OS besides the 4gb of ram??

[deathrage4life]

what does the 64 bit have in an adavantage besides the 4gbs of ram. and faster?? what?

 

[badge]

A 64 bit processor works really well with a 64 bit OS to run.

 

[deathrage4life]

A 64 bit processor works really well with a 64 bit OS to run.

so should i buy the 64bit even though im not using 4gbs of ram??

 

[badge]

Vista 64 is where the action is. It is fast becoming the weapon of choice among enthusiasts. If you are going to use a 32 bit OS skip Vista 32 and just use XP. SP3 is hosing a lot of XP systems these days.

 

[badge]

With Vista 64 2 gigs of RAM minimum, preferably 4 due to Vista's Superfetch ability.

 

[badge]

Vista and Superfetch.

http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=2917&p=4

How much RAM do you really need for Windows Vista? We recommend a bare minimum of 1GB of memory for all Vista users, 2GB if you're a power user but don't have a lot running at the same time, and 4GB if you hate the sound of swapping to disk.

 

[pcCodinFoo]

I happen to be a computer engineer and a software programmer so I understand the very lowest levels of the hardware and how the software interfaces with it.

Here is the deal with Vista 64-bit dude:
First the negatives:
Microsoft has not yet changed most of their ISA (instruction set architecture) which means most of their instructions are still 32 bit. So in Vista 64-bit, the OS essentially wastes 32 bits most of the time. Microsoft will change this over time so that they are taking full advantage of all 64 bits. The only negative effect this has is that until then you will need twice as much memory to run the same programs you run in a 32-bit OS.
So if you had an XP machine that you had 2 GB of RAM in and you liked how it performed you should put 4 GB in a Vista 64-bit machine (this does not account for the approximately 10% extra memory usage needed by all the new overhead in Vista)

Now for the positives:
If you give Vista 64-bit enough RAM (I put 8 GB in my Vista 64-bit machine) it will actually run a little faster than XP even with the overhead (while the 32-bit version of Vista is actually slower than XP). This is because of the differences in the way memory addressing is handled between the two. Vista 64 can make much larger jumps when fetching instructions or data without the penalty of extra clock cycles to calculate absolute addresses from indirect addresses and offsets because a 64 bit instruction can always contain the absolute address of data needed for the instruction.
Microsoft has the vast majority of the driver issues that existed at launch all worked out now so honestly there isn't a better gaming rig option than Vista 64-bit.
Also, Vista will be tweaked over time to improve performance just like XP has been since 2001 so it is only going to get better.

 

[notherdude]

I happen to be a computer engineer and a software programmer so I understand the very lowest levels of the hardware and how the software interfaces with it.

Here is the deal with Vista 64-bit dude:
First the negatives:
Microsoft has not yet changed most of their ISA (instruction set architecture) which means most of their instructions are still 32 bit. So in Vista 64-bit, the OS essentially wastes 32 bits most of the time. Microsoft will change this over time so that they are taking full advantage of all 64 bits.
So if you had an XP machine that you had 2 GB of RAM in and you liked how it performed you should put 4 GB in a Vista 64-bit machine (this does not account for the approximately 10% extra memory usage needed by all the new overhead in Vista)

Now for the positives:
If you give Vista 64-bit enough RAM (I put 8 GB in my Vista 64-bit machine) it will actually run a little faster than XP even with the overhead (while the 32-bit version of Vista is actually slower than XP). This is because of the differences in the way memory addressing is handled between the two. Vista 64 can make much larger jumps when fetching instructions or data without the penalty of extra clock cycles to calculate absolute addresses from indirect addresses and offsets because a 64 bit instruction can always contain the absolute address of data needed for the instruction.
Microsoft has the vast majority of the driver issues that existed at launch all worked out now so honestly there isn't a better gaming rig option than Vista 64-bit.
Also, Vista will be tweaked over time to improve performance just like XP has been since 2001 so it is only going to get better.

I'll start by saying that I am NOT a programmer or computer scientist. But I found myself wondering about your claim that "The only negative effect this has is that until then you will need twice as much memory to run the same programs you run in a 32-bit OS." Are you saying that a program I run under Win 32 that will use say, 500 meg ram will use 1 gig under a win 64 OS? If so I find that kind of hard to accept. Could you elaborate? I have not seen anything like this in my own experience or heard of it. This would seem to imply that switching to 64 bit would entail a doubled ram need which would make no sense. I have heard about 64 using more RAM, marginally, in the sense mentioned in the following tidbit I got off a tech blog somewhere "As others have pointed out, only pointers and size_t are expanded to 64-bit; int, long, float, double, short, char are still the same size that they were for 32-bit builds, to the program .exe size and data space requirements do increase, but only modestly. Your data structures *don't* double in size, unless they're all pointers and size_t"

Anyway. I could easily be missing something here. Thanks.