win 7 32 or 64

Hi people got win 7 on thurs and now am thinking of installing today.The thing that i am unsure of is wether to go 64 or 32bit.Could anyone tell me of the benefits of the 64 over 32, apart from extra memory over 4gb being seen, and also of any major drawbacks of the 64 flavour.My pc is pretty modern, Q6600 chip,Asus pk5-c mb,4870 video card so surely no problems hardware wise,please correct me if i,m wrong.Look foward to any advice.Oh forgot to say it,s win 7 home premium retail version.

64-bit will make full use of all the new instructions that your processor can handle; 32-bit will effectively have your processor running with one hand tied behind its back as it can't make use of the extra instructions and registers. Unless you have any specific harware that doesn't have 64-bit drivers I can see no reason to use the 32-bit version.

Thanks for the quick reply, sounds like 64 the way to go but will most of my software be ok, got a huge games collection, as i was reading somewhere games with drm protection i.e mass effect don,t like 64 bit.

games with drm protection

I honestly don't know the answer to that. I've only got a few standard games like Flight Sim and Civilization. Anyone else know?

I have a Dell Vostro with Q6600 processor and 4gb RAM. W7 x64 runs superbly on it. I also run Photoshop CS4 and that loads as a 64 bit application.

The only minor snag I found is that my 8 year old Canon LIDE30 scanner does not have an x64 driver. I got round this by installing virtual Windows XP (free from Microsoft) and installing the scanner in that using the XP driver.

I've got a duel processor,so should I try the 64 or 32 upgrade ?

Just go 64bit - it's the future and support is excellent..

Remember - the 32 bit limit is the total memory installed and that includes your graphics card

I've had Windows 7 Professional 64-bit for a month now and so far I've had no problems with it (touch wood). I have a lot of games, some the latest games and some games that are a few years old and they work perfectly.

Mine's a Dell Studio with Q8300 Quad-Core with 6GB RAM for your information.

64-bit is definitely the way to go in my opinion.

My computer says it's 32 but as I say has got a duel processor.