The latest installment of Windows has been quite a good success, especially when compared to Vista! If you’re planning on buying Windows 7 then you are going to need to decide between 32bit and 64bit. Now, depending on your processor you may only be capable of running 32bit, you are going to need to check if your processor is 64bit capable.

You can check this in either device manager or your computer properties, if you’re on a 32bit processor then you should have (x86) next to your processor listing, if you’re on 64bit then you should have (x64) next to it.

Now that you’ve determined what processor you have you can decide upon whether you should go for 32bit or 64bit Windows 7. There are a few things to consider first before doing this.

Firstly, how much memory do you have? If you have 4GB or under and don’t plan on ever going above 4GB (most people won’t be doing this for a while) then 64bit Windows is going to be quite pointless. Essentially Windows 7 64bit will allow you to use more than 4GB of ram. Technically speaking 4GB is the limit for a 32bit processor and operating system. 64bit allows for much more memory usage.

Whether you need more than 4GB of ram is dependent upon what you use your computer for, if you’re running lots of different memory intensive applications at once then you might benefit from more than 4GB and in which case the 64bit Windows 7 is for you.

If however you are a casual user and don’t plan on running lots of different programs at once then chances are you won’t need to go for the 64bit edition. Having the 64bit Windows 7 isn’t something you should consider unless you really need it. The reason I say this is because there are still issues with 64bit drivers for some hardware. Simply put if you have some uncommon third party hardware there might not be any 64bit Windows 7 drivers available, and if there aren’t – you won’t be able to use it!

This is the most common reason for people to not upgrade to a 64bit operating system because of the lack of driver support for a lot of hardware; this is especially applicable for Windows 7 because it is a relatively new version of windows.

My advice to anyone considering Windows 7 64bit over 32bit is this – Do you have more than 4GB of memory and are you going to benefit from more? Most casual users simply don’t need it right now and you might think it’s great to have 8GB or more, but a lot of the time it simply won’t get used. If you are running many applications at once and you know for sure that your memory usage can get quite high then yes, go for Windows 7 64bit, but also be aware that you might have to spend some time hunting down 64bit versions of drivers for your hardware.

If you do decide to go for 64bit Windows then you can be safe in the knowledge that your operating system is now future proof and having Windows 7 64bit should mean you won’t need to upgrade for quite a long time!