64 Bit O/S
 

I am sick of people saying switch to 64 bit O/S , it is just damn useless when you play old games etc , yeah it is more secure etc but unless you only ever use the latest games etc I have found it useless

every time I have tried to use 64 bit I had to go back to 32 bit so has anybody had a better experience?

Nope, you pretty much summed it. I heard a lot of similar stories to yours.

For me, Vista and 64 bits = useless. 64 bits probably have a good use somewhere, but it's useless for old gaming.

In fact it's completely ridicule to want to run a 64 bit OS when you're mainly using your PC for gaming purposes, mail, and do some surfing.

On the other hand .... running a 64 bit OS on a quad core, +12 GB RAM and the appropriate programs allows you to rip a full DVD movie into high quality AVI format in less then 15 minutes.
Also it allows you to run several VMs full speed.

Would I personally buy such PC for home use if I wouldn't get it from my firm? Nope.

My 'home' PC is still a AMD Athlon64 3500+ running XP32/Vista32, that's still more then enough for private use.

I'll probably switch to a 64-bit OS cause I need the extra RAM for music production, otherwise it's still perfectly ok to use 32-bit OS for pretty mich anything.

64 bit is the way to go because:

- drivers, software AND hardware are being designed primarily for 64 bit now. This means that 32 bit support may actually grow worse (while it was the opposite a year or two ago).

- 3GB memory is nothing when it comes to modern games and that's all you'll get with 32bit Windows.

Yes, you lose 16bit support but that's it unless you got outdated hardware with poor 64 bit drivers. And let me tell you, only pre-3D card games use 16bit anyway meaning you can just use Dosbox or Virtual Machine to run the few games that won't work properly.

If you don't have to change, don't, but for top end games, there's already a very noticeable difference in performance. Heck, I'm going to switch to 8GB soon (Vista precaches meaning it will load practically any program instantly) and with memory being dirt cheap at the moment, it can only be a good thing.

Err... 4GB, actually. ^_^

Nope, Win XP (32-bit) only detects 3,2 GB or even less AFAIK

3GB memory is 6 times what I have, and it didn't stop me from running "modern" games like M&B.

Enough said.

Sorry, but 32-bit anything can handle 4 GB. You might only have 3 GB free when running Windows... :p

Yes, but we were talking about 32-bit Windows the whole time. No 32-bit Windows will detect 4GB RAM (except some Windows Server which uses tricks) and that is because: Is it just me or are EoF and the OP kind of ridiculous though. What you're saying is that you don't need to use the 64-bit system to play old games, old games! WOOOOW! Can you imagine that? You don't need the latest technology to run something that is old. Wow. Just wow.

The point is if you run newer software you can only benefit from having a 64-bit OS, since compatibility is good and more and more apps are providing support for 64-bit.