I know this medium 'll shed more light on the diffrence btw 64bit and 32 bit systems. Can they share softwares? whats the advantage? These are the questions i have 4 gurus of nairaland.

RAM - system memory -

32 bit systems use a maximum of 4gb of ram
64 bit systems can theoretically use 100gb of RAM.

this may not seem like an issue, but f you are running a graphics intensive app - photoshop, 3ds max etal, on a 32 bit system, you can actually see your ram dropping to 0. ( ever done a render of a 10mb model? ) during which period you have to contemplate your system in a zen state for anything from 10 minutes to 1 hour

64 bit systems are gaining serious ground now as virtually all software vendors ship 64 bit version of their programs

the cons of 64bit

unsigned device drivers are not allowed - not an issue in yankee, but in naija with all the chinese hardware we buy, may be an issue, as alot of them have unsigned drivers

Visua basic support. 64 bit windows has no native support for visual basic. VB is run via an emulation layer. this leads to a serious lag when running vb commands. this is an issue - as alot of application addons are coded in visual basic - eg asap utilities for MS excel, dotsofts tools for autocad, and all those cool vbsripts on the net that let you automatically create a restore point, toggle your hodden files, etc.

i'm considering dual booting my next pc with 64 and 32 bit windows

i doubt if i'll make the migration any tiome soon, though , some of my fav apps are 32 bit, and while they will run on 64 bit via emulation, i'm not sure 'm read for the long learning curve of hacking /tweaking on a 64 bit OS.

er oyb i think its a 3GB RAM limit for 32-bit not 4GB cos when i was getting my laptop built thats wot HP sed!

actually, it's like 3.5 gb its the catch 22 of installing 4gb, you will only see 3.5gb at most. incidentally, theres a technology called PAE on intel processors that 'sort of' enables 32 bit OSes to utilize more than 4gb of ram

thanks for the info. . .