Operating System

[Mechatrommer]

64bit windows is... 64bit capabled working operating environment. i mean, it can support softwares with 64bit operation. if you are running 32bit softwares on 64bit windows, then its like giving an old folk with a ferrari. so... its not an OS alone that you should take care, but the whole business

and 64bit operation capabled of calculating greater range of integer/floating values, along with addressing greater range memory/ram location as other mentioned, xp is 3-4GB ram limit coz the 2^32bit = 4294967296 bytes including all those special windows stuffs, with 64bit, the limit will be 2^64 = 18446744073709551616 bytes = 18ExaBytes of ram!. but 64bit will not makes it any faster for the operation, 32bit of a math operation/algorithm will run just the same speed as 64bit version on the same processor clock MIPS. just in case someone misunderstand it that way.

so... when will you be needing the more than 3GB of RAM? up to the exa value of calculation? you must be a scientist running a "theory of everything" simulation on your pc or a hollywood 3D Animation reality rendering business or just simply a 3d gaming nuts. running a EE sim and Arduino IDE? win98 can do that easily (well, except the USB compatibilty which is the reason i upgraded to xp). i myself never hit my 3GB RAM limit with all the fancy stuffs that i have. the only reason that people upgrade to win7 i think is because the fancy support, coloring and those special effex things (personal user, not business) and no real commitment to something, no offense, just my thinking from a remote place here. and personally... i really hates win7 start menu, its a backward in term of user friendlyness (menu and sub menu)

just my 2cnts.

[Mechatrommer]

well... the reported increase in efficiency of 64bit is due to some advantage of 64bit, ie for 32bit machine it will/can treat an RGB data in one memory space where as in 64bits we can store 2 pixels of rgb in one memory space and do the operation/compression at once, hence doubling the speed. but its only application specific. AFAIK, compiler based, math, sim, even the 3d game cannot takes advantage of that except rendering rgb to monitor plane. or at least the algorithm is optimized/tuned to take advantage of 64bit, and hence improving the performance, but it will be hardly twice the speed i doubt, and again it depends on what type of application you are running. just dont expect it to be doubled speed for everything. and again you need a 64bit softwares on 64bits OS to take the full advantage.

[House91320]

win7 and 2000 are the only good micro soft oss

[Mr J]

Been using Ubuntu (yes it's free) http://www.ubuntu.com/ . Been using it for the past three years and really like it. It was a little bit of a learning curve in the transition but not to horrible. Absolutely love it now. I use the Arduino (ver0021), gEDA, Eagle Cad, open office and i can still run my "windows only" Circuit/Traxmaker 2000 and NI Mutisim 10 under WINE.

Also been crash free ever since the change, with windows I was alway fixing virus or had hardware problems, spent more time fixing the bloody computer than using it.