64 Bit Windows with 2GB RAM??

[celtic_warrior99]

Hi, i am thinking of getting a small notebook for school purposes but i see that they are coming loaded with a 64 bit copy of windows even though they only have 2gb RAM. Will there be any performance issues using the 64 bit version instead of the 32 bit version? Or should i reinstall a copy of windows i have using the 32 but version. Thanks

 

[dudeman509]

No issues. 64-bit has some other advantages to it besides being able to handle more RAM.

 

[celtic_warrior99]

OK cool, so i should just leave the 64 bit edition of windows on the laptop then?

 

[dudeman509]

I would, yes. Is the RAM on this machine upgradeable or soldered into the board? I have a machine running W10 with 2 GB, but it runs out of RAM quickly with just Chrome tabs being opened.

 

[celtic_warrior99]

It does have the ram soldered in yes, but i wont be stressing it too much, just word editing and a bit of minecraft.

 

[USAFRet]

Will it work? Yes.
I have a 2009 era Toshiba laptop with 2GB RAM, and Win 10 64bit.

No worries. Leave it as it comes.

 

[celtic_warrior99]

OK, thanks guys, helped me heaps. Cheers

 

[Rabmac]

I would check that you can add more RAM to this system as 2GB is pretty low these days and you will encounter performance issues. Don't get me wrong, sometimes it will be OK but other times it will hang and crash. I would say 4GB is the minimum to be looking at.

 

[celtic_warrior99]

Its a small notebook laptop with soldered in RAM so there isnt anything wrong with what they are doing, it only neeeds 2gb RAM.

 

[Solandri]

Several years ago running DDR2 Ram at 556 or 667 mhtz I could actually tell 64 bit windows was not as fast as 32 bit running 2 gig of ram (I had a scrapyard build max 2 gig and tried both installs)

Yeah, the issue with a 64-bit OS with such a marginal amount of RAM is that program data structures that only require 4 bytes of RAM (e.g. long integer) end up taking 8 bytes. So with the exact same programs loaded and doing the exact same thing, the 64-bit OS will run out of RAM faster than the 32-bit OS.

The OS itself won't cause a performance difference (in fact the 64-bit version will be slightly faster if you run a lot of programs which use 64-bit data structures like double floats). But the performance slowdown will come when you start to run out of RAM and Windows starts swapping to the pagefile.

If you get the notebook (I wouldn't - the minimum I recommend for Windows is 4 GB), I would suggest downloading the 32-bit version of Windows and installing that. The keys are interchangeable between the 32-bit and 64-bit versions.

 

[celtic_warrior99]

ok, so i should go ahead and intsall a copy of windows 10 32 bit on the laptop?

 

[celtic_warrior99]

Whgen i get the laptop that is..

 

[W Fallon]

I don't think you'll be happy with it. I have a monster laptop with not much on it, a lot of Services disabled, and I'm at 1.7GB with just Tom's Forum running on Chrome x64.

Bill

 

[celtic_warrior99]

Hi, i got it yesterdasy, and it actually came with 32 but windows so its fine. and there arent any lag issues at all. so 2gb is good edough for this laptop. thanks for all the answers.