I have 32-bit Vista Home Basic, and will be upgrading to 7 Home Premium. Any reason to switch to 64-bit? My computer is 64-bit capable (Intel Core Duo 2.0GHz and 3GB RAM), but for some reason came pre-installed with 32-bit Vista (it only came with 1GB RAM).
I’m not sure a clean install would be a bad thing, since it seems like there’s a lot of crap on there that’s accumulated over the years that probably slows it down, and I really only use it for web browsing and Microsoft Office.
You should buy the 64-bit if for nothing else you’ll have it should you upgrade your hardware. Running just Office and web browsing on it for now certainly won’t stress either version.
Not much reason to with those specs. But if you up it to 4GB RAM and do x64, then it would release an extra 2GB RAM for your use and speed things up considerably.
64-bit is mainly good for two things.
One, your memory limit effectively goes away. With a decent graphics card, 32-bit Windows clients in reality only give you a maximum of about 3-3.5 GB usable RAM. Plus individual 64-bit applications aren’t limited to being able to use 2 GB RAM as most 32-bit apps are under Windows.
Two, some programs written to take advantage of 64-bit will run faster. The 64-bit chip has 64-bit registers (ultra-fast local memory) instead of 32-bit, and it has double the number of registers in the core and in the SSE unit. These in themselves have shown IIRC a 20% speed bost in some games.
I haven’t verified this, but it is possible Windows itself runs faster as Microsoft probably recompiled it to take advantage of 64-bit processors.
The downsides are 64-bit programs take more memory and disk space and you may have compatibility problems with some older programs.
It also appears none of these improvements will benefit you. But then if you eventually decide to do heavy Photoshop or gaming you’re going to wish you had bought the 64-bit OS.