When Service Pack 1 hit the market for the Vista series, things began to change. I noticed immediately an improvement in stability and speed. It was a change for nothing but the better; however, Vista remains to hold its bad reputation for poor user interface and performance.

A few weeks ago I decided to take it to the next level with Windows Vista and try out the 64bit edition. I was admittedly shy of upgrading because 64bit operating systems aren’t widely supported by all software companies as well as some hardware that requires those 64bit drivers.

Installation of the 64bit installation went smooth; however there was nothing new or fancy from the 32bit version of Vista. It was when I actually logged into the OS for the first time the nightmare started. The responsiveness of Vista 64 was devastatingly slow and choppy. Menus took several seconds to appear and things constantly froze and unfroze. I was beginning to feel that the switch from 32bit was a really bad idea.

Fortunately, I didn’t look back. I gave it a chance to get all the new updates from Microsoft (all since I had the original Vista CD from January, 07). So after an hour or so of updating, things began to change. I got the service pack installed and everything seemed to be running smoothly again. A big difference in performance from 32bit? Not exactly. I have been using 64bit for at least 3 weeks yet and the performance does not vary that much. I have 4GB of RAM with a Core2Duo processor so the general applications won’t see any improvements in how they run. Larger applications such as Adobe Photoshop CS4 seemed to run very smoothly.

64bit is more commonly used for large processing applications to edit HD video, play performance demanding games, and many other things. The best advantage to 64bit is the amount of RAM you are able to use. 32bit operating systems have a limit of 3.25 GB of RAM usage where as 64bit systems do not have this limitation. So if its really worth it to you to exceed 4GB of RAM, you will have to make the switch to 64bit.

Overall, I haven’t really noticed a shockingly increasing in performance for the 64bit Vista edition, but I’m glad I made the switch. 64bit offers a broader range of performance for future applications and will not be left out of the picture by the people that develop them.

Summary

-Vista 64bit works better with the service pack. Serious performance issues without it.

-Before you upgrade, be sure that your hardware has 64bit drivers. Do some researching because 64bit is a big change.

-Ask yourself, do you really need 64bit? If your PC can only install 4GB of RAM, its probably not worth it. If you want 6GB of RAM or more….go for it.

-Think about the future. You can always wait for things to require 64bit to upgrade. 32bit is the safest for “everything” to work. I’m fairly certain 64bit will be developed further and will overtime, push out 32bit operating system.