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From: Doug on 11 May 2010 21:47
Vostro 3500 I'm looking at comes with i5-430M processor and 4 GB
memory and WIndows 7 Professional 32 bit. Should I upgrade to 64 bit
since it costs nothing extra or would I need to add more memory for
the 64 bit to run well?
From: yirg.kenya on 12 May 2010 03:43
On May 11, 6:47 pm, Doug <kestr...(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
> Vostro 3500 I'm looking at comes with i5-430M processor and 4 GB
> memory and WIndows 7 Professional 32 bit.  Should I upgrade to 64 bit
> since it costs nothing extra or would I need to add more memory for
> the 64 bit to run well?

Others in the group undoubtedly have a lot more experience with this
issue, but here's mine.

Nearly 2 years ago I and other engineers received 64 bit dell
workstations. They are fast. They have 8 or 16GB of memory. Don't
remember.

They real advantage of 64 bit is that windows will actually can use
that memory and thus you can avoid the very expensive use of the page
file. (You also get a larger per process address space which can
eliminate or reduce certain applications from having to write
temporary files to disk.) Of course, if you're just doing email or
surfing, this is pretty much an irrelevancy. But it's not to me either
at work or at home, where I have an old Dell E510. It's best for me to
run a virtual machine to connect to work and that sucks resources. But
the real performance problem isn't the processor, it's the paging.
Yeah, a better processor would definitely be better too!

And you can only expect programs and your usage to require more and
more. It never goes the other way.

The downside is that there are programs which are not ported to 64 bit
and some that are not ported well. I've been successful running the 32
bit version of some of them. Whatever 32 compatibility there's
supposed to be, there's also reality. But, it's affected me less and
less as at least some of the vendors have gotten their act together.

However, if the cost is the same it's a no brainer to me. (But others
may weigh in very differently!)

OT-rant: we make a heavy duty, often 24x7 software app. For *nix and
windows. Dell is a customer. I can't fathom why many customers use 32
bit machines for this or similar. It boggles my mind. Especially when
it's a windows box. Yeah, yeah, of course they say money. But they're
always asking (screaming?) for more performance too, where the biggest
bottleneck, imvho, is running on 32 bit boxes.
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