Which one should I buy? 32 or 64 bit Vista? Some differences in Vista 32 and 64 bit:
- Very little hardware driver support for 64 bit, you will find many hardware will not work due to lack of drivers.
- 64 bit drivers needs to be signed by Microsoft. Microsoft needs to approve all drivers before they will work
- as mentioned above drivers that do not have the approved digital signature from Microsoft will not run in Vista 64, this is also a good security feature.
- 64 bit software will run very good on a 64 bit operating system but currently there aren’t very many of them
- 64 bit needs more ram than the 32 bit, 32 bit runs OK with 1 GB, but you will need at least 2 GB for the 64 version
I personally would go for the 32 bit version of Windows Vista, I think the majority of Windows users will be better off with 32 bit Windows. There aren’t really any big advantages to using 64 bit Windows although we do have 64 bit processors available. 64 bit Windows operates on more chunks of data, and probably the most important thing is more access to ram. Vista 32 bit can only see 4 gigs (actually more like 3.25 GB) of ram the 64 bit version can see over 8 GB.
The main disadvantages of 64 bit operating system is the incompatibility with programs and hardware due to lack of drivers currently for 64 bit Vista.
Advantages are users who needs lots of ram can get it through the Windows Vista 64 bit version, programs written for Vista 64 will have increased performance, and 64 bit Vista is more secure than the 32 bit version.