Many new home computers now come equipped with a 64bit processor, the prices for these have come down dramatically in the past few years and soon enough they will become standard. A 64bit processor is capable of running a 64bit Operating System and this is where Windows 64bit comes in. You see many people think that upgrading to Windows 64bit is going to make their computer a lot faster, sadly this isn’t the case. First, lets take a look at what a 64bit processor can do that a 32bit one can’t.
Memory Address Space – The difference between 32bit and 64bit is address space. A 32 bit processor is able to address a space of up to 2^32, which is 4,294,967,295 bytes, this is around 4 Gigabytes, which is a fair bit right? Well a 64bit processor can handle an address space between 0 and 2^64 which is; 18,446,744,073,709,551,615. Let’s put this into perspective, that is 18.5 exabytes of memory! (An exabyte is 1000 terabytes, 1000 gigabytes is 1 terabyte) So that’s a hell of a lot more! But who on earth has this much memory? Well, nobody, in fact most home computers don’t have more than 4GB, for the simple reason that a 32bit Operating system cannot address anymore than this! (Not without some ugly hacks at least)
The Benefits of 64bit – So what actually are the benefits of 64bit Windows? Well if you have 4GB or less then there really aren’t any benefits, and at this point I would safely recommend you stick to 32bit! If you have more than 4GB of memory then 64bit Windows is capable of addressing it, but are you ever likely to need more? Probably not, unless of course you are running several very memory intensive applications at once. But as I write this I have several instance of firefox, windows media player, Microsoft excel, remote desktop open and my memory usage is sitting at around 615mb! The fact of the matter is that most people just don’t use enough memory to warrant a 64bit operating system just yet.
The problems with 64bit – So far i’ve pretty much explained that 64bit Windows is pointless for most people, well here is another reason to not bother with it; driver support. If your going to use Windows 64bit your going to need 64bit drivers, the problem is a lot of hardware manufactures will not have 64bit drivers for a lot of their hardware. When this happens you can try and find a 3rd party version, you can program your own (Yeah right) or you can not use the hardware! Those are your only options. Because of this I seriously recommend that you check if your hardware has 64bit support, without this I simply wouldn’t bother.
So, in summary 64bit Windows looks great on paper, you have an enormous address space that nobody could ever possibly fill (Not for a very very very long time at least!) The cons outweigh the pro’s especially with the inherent problem of driver support (or lack thereof!) So unless your running lots of very memory hungry applications and your confident you can get 64bit versions of driver for your hardware, then I would stick with 32bit Windows for now. Chances are in a few years 64bit will gather a lot more support from hardware manufactures.
For more guides and articles on everything computer related, come check out Stan The Computer Man. You may also like to read my related article on Windows 32bit vs 64bit.
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