What's the downside of getting rid of XP-pro and install XP?

[karbon]

I have XP-pro X64 installed on a 64 bit hardware, CPU, etc.

As much as I like it, there are no drivers for some programs and assorted other issues that is just too much hassle.

- Am thinking of removing XP-pro and install XP-home.
Will this makes the system slower.... reasoning that it's 32 bit XP VS 64 bit PRO?

- How about 64 bit programs? Does it ignores XP32 and just do it's thing on the 64 bit hardware?
Or, will it install as a 32 bit program, thereby negating to have 64 bit hardware?

I'd like hear your opinion and if you have done what I described above.
Any downside or problems, etc.

cheers

[PrntRhd]

FYI there was XP Pro 32 bit without having to resort to XP Home (also 32 bit).
It runs just fine on 64 bit hardware, and drivers are abundant.

XP 64 bit is a rare OS with not much driver support. Vista came along and hardware vendors looking to support 64 bit systems skipped XP64 and went straight to Vista 64.

The amount of memory you can run is the biggest difference with Windows 32-bit OSes vs 64 bit.

[mjc]

OK...as far as 64 bit OS goes...XP in 64 bit flavors are the orphan children of the scum on the bottom of the barrel. Dead end takes on new meaning with 64 bit XP.

Now, 64 bit hardware running 32 bit XP...yeah, there may be a slowdown, but will you actually notice it? Probably not. Most software isn't fully 64 bit so it isn't all running at 'peak efficiency' anyway.

No, you will not be able, at all, in any way, shape or form, to run or install a 64 bit program on a 32 bit OS. Now of course there are not all that many totally 64 bit applications (other than drivers) running around. Most 64 apps are still comprised of many 32 bit parts and most installers are 'smart' enough to check the version of the OS and install the appropriate bits (the 32 bit replacement parts in a 32 bit environment <=this is for commercial software, downloads/freeware/shareware is a different story and may need manual version checking). For drivers, you'll need to actually grab the correct versions.

If you want to fully utilize your 64 bit hardware then you need to go with 64 bit Vista or Linux (or the Win 7 beta...but I'm not sure if it is still legitimately available).

[Paul Komski]

At the current state of play the main functional reason for running 64bit OSes is to be able to utilise more than 4GB RAM on 64bit hardware. For the foreseeable future you are unlikely to see any other speed benefits and even find possible limitations due to the unavailability of drivers and so forth. In the future, when software developers have caught up, there may be many benefits.

[karbon]

thanks guys, the XP pro is gonna get deleted and installing the XP :)
It's just too much hassle to use X64
It's too bad that XP don't support more than 3GB memory.

cheers

[awaj]

32 bit does support more then 3 gigs. Depending on hardware, it typically sees about 3.5 gigs. The remaining .5 gigs or so can be allocated with a program (I do not know what said program is, sorry) somehow so that it will add to your graphics card, or your CPU, or other hardware. Aside from Ubuntu, I'm currently running 64 bit for my system with 4 gigs...so I don't know too much about the allocation process...

[mjc]

OK, one more time...4 GB is the absolute maximum (and no, not 4,000,000,000 B but rather 4,294,967,296 B) of memory that any 32 bit OS can deal with, sans fancy manipulations by a memory manager.

The area between 3 GB and 4 GB and exactly how much of it gets used is totally dependent upon the OS and how it does things...

Now, Karbon...XP Pro and 64 bit XP are not necessarily the same thing. 32 bit XP Pro is much preferable, in my opinion, to XP Home.