Are there any advantages in running Win 7 64-bit apart

"I was talking this over with a friend very recently and I came to the conclusion that there are no real benefits if everything you have 3GB of memory or under.

I always thought that 64bit machines ran 32bit code in emulation and it should be slower, however I installed Windows Vista x86 and x64 side by side and could not believe that the x86 edition started about 6-10 seconds quicker.

Also the benefits are more free hard drive space.

Typically programs that are designed for x64 machines are marginally larger (as the overhead code to support the larger address space is bigger) but again, this is only a tiny fraction bigger.

Lastly, I noticed that even the same processes that are 32bit seem to sometimes take up more memory when running on a x64 machine.

There will be a time when x86 is ancient and you will not get Windows to run on it, but I don't think that will be for some time and even then, you will most likely to still get 32 bit programs running on top of it (They would really be shooting themselves in the foot if not!).

To sum up, in my personal opinion, if you have under 3GB of memory and have no special reason to need to have a x64 machine, I wouldn't."

"It makes your PC easier to upgrade- both in hardware and in software. If you suddenly needed some extra RAM, and you're on the limit, you'll have to reformat to a 64-bit OS first before you can upgrade~ The same goes for software.

=D I always install 64-bit OS when the hardware allow~"