In reply to a post by AnotherExPipex:

I'm pretty sure that if you can't find a 64-bit Windows 7 driver for some piece of hardware you won't be able to find a 32-bit one either.

My Canon Canoscan 3200F scanner says otherwise, works fine in Win7 32bit but nothing at all for 64bit. Thankfully I have Win7 Pro so I use the XP VM included and that gets round the problem.

Regards,
Steve

I've found that in various respects Windows 764bit just works better than 32bit regardless of the amount of RAM available.

In reply to a post by Desmond:

Windows 764bit

764 bits - must have missed that major jump in processors

I have had to go back to 32 bit as I cannot get 32 bit drivers for my colour printer / scanner and I am not prepared to spend more money

Less than 2Gb means the OS takes up near 50% of memory. Sure, the OS will run better, but when you start loading large programs they'll start touching the page-file too often.

I can't say I've noticed an issue there myself and the machine I've noticed the difference on most (a HTPC) has only 2 gig and a rather lowly 1.6 Ghz dual core pentium processor. Frankly, the whole machine is smoother and more responsive in 64 compared to 32 bit. Maybe if you ran memory hungry apps it might be an issue, but if you did then you'd surely have more than 2 gig of RAM anyway?

You don't appear to be disagreeing with me, just trying to nitpick?

I didn't disagree. I just pointed out my real world experience and supposed your observation might be an issue with RAM hungry apps. I then pointed out that a sensible user of RAM hungry apps wouldn't be using a miserly 2 gigs of RAM in the first place.

I currently have Vista HP (ver 6001 sp1) and there seems to be IE 32bit and IE64bit installed but not sure which ?bit of the O/S is installed.

I ran the Win 7 advisor on my XP PC and most of the software and half my peripherals can't be run under Win 7 so I'll put the Win 7 upgrade in the drawer until drivers are available and I can afford to update some programs.

If IE64 is installed, and runs, on your system then you must be running a 64-bit OS. It just wouldn't run on a 32-bit OS.