[Advice] The 32/64bit question, and my specific needs?

[Wilbur]

I find this extremely hard to believe.

I have never had a single problem with XP 64 bit.

My kit isn't exactly recent.

[Remote]

I heard a lot of horror stories when it first came out. Haven't used it myself.

[aetherg]

I think you may have just gotten lucky; if you google you can easily find tons of pages about people getting blue screens installing XP 64 due to SATA drive and motherboard driver support.

I'm not saying the OS is totally unusable; I've been using it for a year. It's just not worth the potential trouble unless you absolutely must have 4GB of RAM instead of 3GB. And in that case you'd be better off just getting Vista and hoping SP1 releases soon.

[thyrm]

You can use all 4gb of RAM in Windows XP without installing the 64bit version. If you have all the RAM installed when installing Windows XP, it should recognize and use all of it without manipulation. If you installed Windows XP with less than 4gb of RAM and then upgraded, you will need to use the /pae switch on your boot.ini file. Here is more detailed information:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system...AE/PAEdrv.mspx

[Gallo]

If you're willing to spend ~$100 more than the q6600, intel is releasing their new line of quad cores on January 20th, and they are an entirely new technology. The Q9450 is going to be the mid-range one, and it has a 12mb cache on it (as opposed to 6mb on the Q6600) and is apparently going to be an overclockers dream.

I'm going to buy one of these puppies when they come out.

[Vos]

You can use all 4gb of RAM in Windows XP without installing the 64bit version.

This is incredibly misleading, and is only true if you have no devices in your system with Ram. Unfortunately any system that can play wow at all, let alone multibox will need a video card with some form of ram addressed that will take away from your total available Ram... and there are tons of other devices that allocate ram in a typical home/game system....

[Bollwerk]

I use 64-bit Vista and have no problems with any games or drivers. I don't even have SP1 yet. So IMHO, go ahead and get 64-bit Vista. Especially if you plan to play any of the newer DX10 games.

[banksie]

I recently installed XP x64, installation went fine on a new SATA drive. Probs came with older 3com ethernet card, no drivers for it. Also Creative can't make proper drivers for their soundcards, so i sold my x-fi to my friend. Now using integrated realtek sound and nic :cry:

I think i need to research abit and get a soundcard that works with x64.

[Sam DeathWalker]

I use win2K and see 3.66 Gig of ram, which is close enough to 4 gig that I dont really see a big edge to moving to 64 bit.

M2N32-SLI Premium Vista Edition I have that and it has 512MB of flash ram on the motherboard. And I have 4 gig ram in the machine.

[Kilh]

I use 64-bit Vista and have no problems with any games or drivers. I don't even have SP1 yet. So IMHO, go ahead and get 64-bit Vista.

I agree with this, I'm running it on two newly built Q6600 machines with no issues whatsoever.