With vista and xp I always had problems installing their respective 64 bits versions, and always had to format and install them in 32 bits.
Problems like incompatibility with other programs, the system hangs, etc.
Tonight I will be installing windows 7 on my notebook, and I am faced with the choice again.
Has someone tried win 7 in 64 bits? Would you recommend it over the 32 bits version?
64 bit works fine.
If you have poor quality drivers, you'll have poor performance and stability. This has been true in Windows since the dawn of time.
Applications also work just fine - including plenty of games, too. We have about 6 computers here running 64 bit Windows 7, for work and play - all fine.
The driver issue has gotten much better since Microsoft withheld WHQL logo certification for drivers that don't come in 64-bit.
So it depends greatly on how old your hardware is, including stuff like printers, but if your manufacturer says Win7 compatible it will also work on 64-bit.
The only issue I've run into so far on Vista 64-bit and Windows 7 64-bit is the bloody Cisco VPN client software which is available as as 32-bit version only, and a few system-related "browser helper objects" that IE wants to install for remote server administration, which again, only work in 32-bit (Juniper Network helper and others - just launch IE 32-bit for these cases).
Other than that, 64-bit Vista and Win7 just hum along very nicely. I have installed all sorts of Office products and add-ons, Visual Studio, lots of other programming tools (XML stuff, database stuff, lots of stuff), a ton of utilities and tools of all kinds (printer add-on like FinePrint, graphics stuff, pdfFactory Pro, text and hex editors and a lot more) - all works just fine.
Marc
64 bits is definitely the way to go! 64 bit will do twice the processing in the same number of cycles versus the 32 bit version of windows.
Just right there is a compelling reason to use the proper build for your x64 processor. Using the 32 bit version will only use half of the processors capability which is a waste.
This page has some illustrative comparison data between x32 and x64 for you to look over.
