I've been thinking of upgrading to this before Windows 7 comes out. I've never used a 64-bit operating system so I'm a bit of a newbie. Can I still run 32-bit applications on this? Or only 64? What are the advantages of x64 XP? System specs are: AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ NVIDIA GeForce 9500GT 2GB DDR2-400 RAM 1TB 7200rpm SATAII drive Also, I've been looking around for drivers 64-bit to no avail? Can I get some help to find 64 bit ones for: Mobo: ECS GeForce6100PM-M2 GPU: NVIDIA 9500GT 512MB DDR2 And other necessary ones Thanks heaps.
The only advantage of a 64-bit operating system is that is supports more than 4 GB of RAM. So your system can be fitted with 3.5 GB or more RAM. The 64-bit edition of XP is quite bad (Microsoft's first attempt to create a 64-bit version of Windows). If you do need a 64-bit version, I'd suggest to wait for Windows 7 and then buy the 64-bit version. But you only have 2 GB of RAM, so you really wouldn't need a 64-bit OS.
Just an FYI, but Linux supports up to 64GB of RAM. That goes for both 32-bit and 64-bit distros. I'm running Debian (32-bit) with 8gb of RAM. As for advantages of 64-bit in general, it's much better for advanced math operations like physics simulations, databases, graphical rendering, ray tracing, etc. Most applications today are 32-bit, so they require a subset of 32-bit libraries to run. Having both 64-bit and 32-bit libraries running at once can actually slow things down, and cause the system to use more memory than it usually would. Also, 64-bit code is relatively new in terms of desktop application (though it's been available on servers for years), so desktop-oriented software that's only recently been ported to 64-bit tends to be buggier than average. For a desktop machine today, 32-bit holds the most advantages. Give it a year or two and most apps will be native 64-bit and a lot more reliable.
