Many new home computers now come equipped with a 64bit processor, soon enough they will become standard. and the prices for 64bit processor have come down dramatically in the past few years. A 64bit processor is capable of running a 64bit Operating System and this is where Windows 64bit comes in. Many people think that upgrading to Windows 64bit is going to make their computer a lot faster, sadly this isn't the case.Take a look for a moment on what a 64bit processor can do that a 32bit one can't.
Memory Address Space - The difference between 32bit and 64bit is address space.Able to address a space of up to 2^32 is the 32 bit processor, which is 4,294,967,295 bytes, this is around 4 Gigabytes, which is a fair bit right?Well a 64bit processor can handle an address space between 0 and 2^64 which is; 18,446,744,073,709,551,615. Let's put this into perspective, that is 18.5 exabytes of memory! (An exabyte is 1000 terabytes, 1000 gigabytes is 1 terabyte) So that's a hell of a lot more for rackmount server! For the simple reason that a 32bit Operating system cannot address anymore than this, most home computers don't have more than 4GB!
The Benefits of 64bit - So what actually are the benefits of 64bit Windows? There really aren't any benefits if you have 4GB or less, and at this point I would safely recommend you stick to 32bit!Do you likely to need more if you have more than 4GB of memory? Probably not, unless of course you are running several very memory intensive applications at once. But as I write this I have several instance of firefox, windows media player, Microsoft excel, remote desktop open and my memory usage is sitting at around 615mb! To warrant a 64bit operating system the fact is most people just don't use enough memory.
The problems with 64bit - So far i've pretty much explained that 64bit Windows is pointless for most people, well here is another reason to not bother with it; driver support. The problem is a lot of hardware manufactures will not have 64bit drivers for a lot of their hardware for super micro servers. When this happens you can try and find a 3rd party version. Your only options are only those. Without this I simply wouldn't bother, because of this I seriously recommend that you check if your hardware has 64bit support.
So, in summary 64bit Windows looks great on paper, an enormous address space that nobody could ever possibly fill you will have.The cons outweigh the pro's especially with the inherent problem of driver support (or lack thereof!) Then I would stick with 32bit Windows for now unless your running lots of very memory hungry applications and your confident you can get 64bit versions of driver for your hardware. Chances are in a few years 64bit will gather a lot more support from hardware manufactures.
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