XP Home Edition and Pentium D CPU

[kise]

I am running XP Home Edition and with a Pentium D CPU.

What Windows OS will use the capabilities of my Dual Core, 64 bit processor?

Thanks,

Kise

[vehelpfulguy]

The world is slowly moving from 32 bit to 64 bit, but too be honest it is a bit early to jump into the 64 bit world so I would say wait a few months.

There are versions of Windows that support 64 bit architecture, but there may be problems getting 64 bit drivers for your hardware so I would not install that.

To be honest I would wait for Windows Vista later this year or early next year. This will support 32 bit and 64 bit and I would assume most hardware manufacturers will provide 64 bit versions of their drivers.

Remember that even if you move to 64 bit Windows all the applications you install will still be 32 bit so you may not gain much.

Also note that Windows 64 bit does not support 16 bit at all, so if one of your 32 bit applications still uses 16 bit technology it will crash.

There is a Microsoft 64 bit page here, and a useful article in the bottom right, find out if Windows x64 is right for you (a word doc).

This gives a good overview of 64 bit and explains some of the problems you may get.

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/64bit/default.mspx

[fo3nix]

Further to vehelpfulguy's information, XP Home does not support dual core processors. I believe pro does however.

Also, a 64-bit processor will not make things run twice as fast as a 32-bit processor, as many people seem to think. there are all sorts of other factors to take into consideration too (for a start the data blocks are larger for 64-bit), so in reality the 64-bit systems may end up being 30-50% faster than their 32-bit counterparts.

[AussieGeoff]

G'Day

Further to the advice you already have:

XP Home will install, but will not recognise the second processor, whereas XP Pro will recognise both processors - I think Pro will actually recognise upto 4 processors.

You could install XP 64 bit edition, but as vehelpfulguy states, you will need 64 bit drivers for all your peripherals - printer, scanner etc or you will not be able to install them, let alone use them.

Likewise you could install Vista when it is released (sometime before 2050) but you may need a very powerful computer to get it to work - I have seen some requirements (a couple of different reviews) which state you will need 15GB of free space on the disk/partition that you want to install it on, a separate video card with at least 128MB of RAM and 512MB of memory. I would be wary of the minimum memory - XP supposedly runs on 128MB of memory, but realistically you nedd a minimum od 512MB, if Vista is the same you are going to need 2GB of memory to get any performance out of it.

Geoff