You need to consider that 32 will be phased out, As stated elsewhere in this thread, some companies are no longer supporting 32. This will only progress. Either you go with the progression or stay behind. The choice is your alone, but do not make an issue just because you do not want to go with 64. use the 32 bit version and be happy
Thank you again for your answers. Maybe I should make this a bit clearer…. If I were to buy, or rather build, a new desktop computer, I would of course use 64.Because that is what is there! The misunderstanding here seems to be that I am NOT defending 32 against 64? I have asked a question, because I wanted to know its answer. This is not a debate, and looking at your answers from that angle….To me a difference is something between a Celeron M and an i5, or between an HDD and an SSD. Bigger, even if it is ram, is not necessarily between in my world Right now. my notebook for traveling has finally given up all the ghost it had. I will again buy another one, and again without OS, and install my usual Win7 ulti on it, which happens to be 32. And it will do everything I want it to do. I asked this question to see, if I actually will be missing anything that matters, if I use 32 again. And after 22 answers, NO, you have not shown me anything I did not know before. There is nothing, and by that I mean there is nothing, that is necessary (or matters) FOR ME! Maybe you should also think about simple facts like: Almost every single hospital on this world is using XP still! And I see a lot of hospitals, in first world countries! 32 will be phased out… so? Where is the problem? 64 can use 16 exabytes? What has that got to do with me? 2GB ram have been sufficient for my purposes without one single exception…. Also, I mean it, when I say thank you for your effort. You have not changed my mind, but now I KNOW, before I did not.
You will have to buy an older notebook because if you buy anything new, you will not be able to use Windows 7. Manufactures only make new notebooks for Windows 10 and you will not be able (or have a difficult time) getting drivers for 7 to run on a new notebook. if it has a newer cpu then you will not be able to install Windows 7 at all, without some difficulty . Go and get Windows 10 32 and remove all but 3 gb of ram (can not use anything more than 3gb) . Then you can be happy
There is no such thing. You can either activate as HyperCore or RDSH to get full access to 4GB, or use PAEpatch to get more than 4GB Bear in mind that intel VGA drivers are buggy. They go to black screen with more than 3.x GB of ram available. You can use the Intel XP drivers on Win7, but you'll be forced to basic display drivers on w8/8.1/10 (which aren't that bad) No problem at all with AMD/Nvidia/other brands.
Many netbook gpu's may use up to 1gb ram to use the on board video, even with 4gb enabled through pae, you'll still be less than 4gb
1GB taken by the vga in 32bit is the same 1GB taken on 64bit, so what's your point? On the contrary, sometimes, the opposite is true. Often x64 drivers takes way more space for VGA caching (I guess) My HP Gen10 microserver (which has 8GB of RAM on board) has 7GB available in 32bit, but just 6GB in 64bit. 1GB is taken by the VGA on both systems, but on 64bit that GB is "duplicated" by the vga driver, so 2GB are wasted instead of just one. To be clear PAEpatach allows to use way more than 4GB, it's just the HyperCore activation that has the limit set to 4GB (don't ask me why, given (obviously) there isn't a single HypeCore OS on 32 bit. So they just put a random policy value for x86, w/o any reason).
I guess the point for most common folks is that they are limited by using 3 to 3.5 gb ram with x86 and by using x64 they could use up to 64gb ram and 1 gb ram for video would not be noticed as much as with 4gb ram with pae, More ram means less pagefile space on your hard drive (some peeps do not use a pagefile with extra ram), which improves the performance of the pc.
Sure, if you have 64GB is very likely that you don't realize how much faster a 32bit os is. It's like living in the USA in the '60, driving a monster car of the time, and asking why British/Germans/Italians/and so on, wanted to buy/drive a 3m long car. If your resources are limited you notice the wasted ones, otherwise everything looks fine. That's obvious but Even with a stock 32bit OS (3.x GB) you can take a big advantage of a lot of physical ram, just use a ramdisk like Gavotte (which has its own PAE mode), place there your swapfile, the browser cache, the temp directory and so on. And you will have an even faster OS, with a bonus of a greatly reduced SSD wearing (hence that's a good idea for x64 as well). Don't forget that in a 32 bit system, everything is smaller, swapfile included, so less data to read/write/transfer, again faster operations.