When most people buy a box with Windows 7 on the front they don't involve themselves in pedantic arguments about which part of it is an operating system and which is an application. They just want to be able to install the appliction on the DVD and then use their PC.

As someone on this thread said, Microsoft market Windows 7 as an Operating System. To nitpick about what different parts of it are called is silly. It's a whole, which allows users to use their PC. And the 64-bit version allows users, for whatever reason, to make better use of their PC than the 32-bit version. That's all that matters - ther rest is introspective pedantry.

Some may even find that I have helped them here.

A couple of interesting articles on the subject.

The Lifehacker Guide to 64-bit vs. 32-bit Operating Systems

Do You Really Need More Than 4GB of RAM?

Good article - particularly the explanation of the fallacy about memory usage.

Last point from me. I haven't read the report from a new poster about the tests done on memory and 32/64 bit systems but you stating that an OS is quicker doesn't answer the question about what apps run quicker using 64.

Surely just because the OS is quicker it doesn't follow that an older 32bit app or new 64bit app runs any quicker on the 64bit OS.

Do most people install the OS and the included apps/software (whatever) not install anything else? I think not!

Have the last say and we'll leave it at that.

I think this discussion ran out of steam about 50 posts ago. You stick with 32 bit and I'm happy with 64 bit.

haha on the do you need 4 gig of ram.

my task manager currently reports 905meg as free out of my 6 gig.

When I was still on XP with 3 gig of ram I had disk swapping.

mine reports 950 out of 6G free, however there is 3707M cached and the task manager shows 1.96G used- so I suspect if I fireup some memory hungry stuff it will kick out cache as required

I have the same situation - comes of using sleep mode instead of switch off - except mine got down to about 220MB free and running the Windows 7 system check it announced that the ram was very poor, disk drive poor, CPU poor and graphics card poor. A reboot and everything was in good shape.
I haven't found any method of manually clearing the cache in Windows 7

I am sitting here, typing this message on a machine running 64 bit.

Before Windows 7 I would've said, don't bother, XP and Vista really didn't bother too much with x64 so neither did the development community. The same can be said of Linux distros until recently.

I've always thought that luddism to be just a bit of a non sequitur - it's the modern day equivalent of replacing Windows 98/2000 with Windows 3.1 on the basis that you have a few 16 bit Windows applications.

I've benchmarked Windows 2003 x64 compared to its x86 brother, and while x86 did boot faster to the desktop, x64 was way more stable (and performed better overall) when IIS, Sharepoint and SQL were all running on the same box with the same amount of RAM.

Vista (even the x86 variety) failed my compatibility testing for some applications, but it is a reasonable performer in its x64 incarnation for 99% of the stuff I have to do, and I can run a VM to do everything else. So, I'm running Vista x64 on my work machine. Vista x86 was marginally faster when not actually having to do very much, but as soon as I put it under load, it had a tendency to get sluggish - the x64 version (on the exact same machine with the same apps loaded) doesn't experience that issue.

Windows 7 in both flavours trounces Vista for application compatibility and performance but again x64 does appear to cope with heavy workloads a lot better than x86.

Anecdotally, I know of a reasonable sized company (over 500 staff in over a dozen offices across the UK) who were already edging toward selecting Windows 7 for rollout to all their desktops, all the way back in June.

They found x86 was marginally faster for boot-up and "bog standard" apps like Office and Internet Explorer but as soon as they whacked something more intensive on the machine, like Visual Studio or video authoring applications, x64 just seemed to cope better.