Although 8GB may seem like overkill right now, history has shown that as a general rule more RAM has never been a bad idea.

Quote from dadge :

lol, i remeber when people used to tell me that i could never use more than a 20gb hdd. not i have 600GB. imo, it's better to have something and not need it rather than need something and not have it.

My first HDD was 120Mb, and I never filled it. Now my Windows partition alone has about 10Gb of data on it, and that's just XP.

Your point is a good one, but I'd argue it's better to buy things when you need them rather than in anticipation, especially when talking about performance parts like memory. Obviously 8Gb of new, quick RAM is better than 8Gb of old, slow RAM.

I have 2 Windows installed. XP 32 bit and Vista 64 bit where all of my 8GB mem are available.

But I spend 95% of my time in XP. Why? Because of shitty driver support and lack or 64 bit apps. My gfx board tend to "disable" direct X thingies, but I'm pretty lucky. It snaps back on in a sec or two later, while I've read that some have to wait much much longer, and there are others who are forced to restart the computer.

My beloved Audigy soundboard is supporded - but since I'm using 5.1 headphones and Creative Labs are whores, I can't use my headphones in stereo mode. Well, Ok... a dude hacked the drivers so it is possible, but the hack is kinda buggy and sound quality suffers.

There's even lack of 32 bit software capable of running on Vista 64 - and also lack of propper functioning apps. Apps which are officially reported as being able to run on Vista 64 (some features gets disabled - sucky for me as these are the ones I prioritize the most.. doh!).

It was a big disappointment to me - however, I do 3D stuff and my 3D app is in 64 bit.. so I do get some use out of it

Would I recommend 64 bit? Nope... but then again - I expect my system to work flawlessly.

Quote from r4ptor :

Would I recommend 64 bit? Nope... but then again - I expect my system to work flawlessly.

ive been using xp64 for about a year now and the only things that dont work are very old 16 bit games and my gameport
everything else works flawessly... or at least not one bit worse than on a 32 bit sys

in other words... ur doing it wrong

Quote from Shotglass :

ive been using xp64 for about a year now and the only things that dont work are very old 16 bit games and my gameport
everything else works flawessly... or at least not one bit worse than on a 32 bit sys

..and I was referring to Vista 64bit.

Quote from r4ptor :

..and I was referring to Vista 64bit.

I'm using Vista64 and I've not come into any compatability issues that couldn't be solved, and thats only 1 or 2, dunno why you're having so much difficulty?

I don't have many bug related issues - but the few I have are annoying and give me the impression that Vista is still immature and/or developers are slacking it.

I'm mostly disappointed by the lack of 64 bit apps - sure, you can have more applications running if you have enough RAM, but I'm more interested (and I believe most would be as well) in being able to do more in the individual apps such as 2D, 3D and video related work.

I've read an article a couple months ago that said if you have 8GB of RAM then you can turn off the page file in Windows. They tried this in Vista and it ran faster than before. Have any of you tried this? If this is indeed true then this would be a good benefit of having so much RAM.