More and more people each day are facing the dilemma on whether to install the 64bit edition of windows, whether it be for xp, vista (although I hope by now that people have realised how bad an OS vista really is!) or Windows 7. And why wouldnt they? More and more computers are coming with 64bit proessors giving people the choice of a 32bit operating system or a 64bit operating system. Lets take a look at the differences between the two.

Address Space – Without going into too much detail on how a processor works you need to know that processors read data as bits, which can also be refered to as binary or a 1 or 0.  With a 32bit processor you can handle numbers from 0 to 2^32 or 4,294,967,295. Thats a big number, right? Well a 64bit processor can handle numbers from 0 to 2^64 or 18,446,744,073,709,551,615. So to put these into numbers you can relate to a bit more; a 32bit processor can address roughly 4GB of memory, a 64 bit processor on the other hand can address approximately 18.5 exabytes of memory (1000gb = 1 terabyte, 1000 terabytes = 1 exabyte!) Now im sure you will all agree thats a lot of memory! More than anyone is ever going to need for a long time!

To sum this up, if you have more than 4GB of memory on a 32bit operating system then its never really being used and its technically sitting there doing nothing. If however your on a 64bit operating system then you can address more than 4GB of memory. Most operating systems will still have their own memory limit but its usually very high, Vista Ultimate for example has a limit of 128GB.

The benefits – Ok so we’ve established that we can address a LOT more memory with a 64 bit processor and operating system, but what does this actually mean for the average user? Well quite frankly not a lot! The problem is that the majority of software available has been designed for 32bit and therefore cannot really take advantage of the 64bit features and address space, sure there are a few 64 bit software editions (x64) but there usually few and far between. If your running several memory hungry applications at once then you will probably see some benefits, but for the average user this is unlikely.

The problems – For a lot of people upgrading to a 64bit operating system could soon turn into a nightmare when you try to find 64bit drivers for your hardware. Your normal drivers will NOT work, period. So you need to hope that the manufacture has created 64bit versions or you get lucky and find a 3rd party release. Luckily most 32bit software will run fine on a 64bit operating system in compatibility mode. 16bit software on the other hand will NOT work on 64bit, although most people will no longer use any 16bit software.

In summary then 64 bit operating systems are great, on paper. In practice though there is simply not enough support for 64bit right now and for the average user there is no benefit to upgrading from 32bit to 64bit. In a few years time this will probably change but for now, id stick with 32bit!