OK,
it seems the cause of the problem is an unrecoverable error on the hard disk. Somewhere around the 2 gig(of 300 gb hd) there is an unrecoverable error causing the instability. Once the os writes there, the comp hangs etc.
Is there any way you know of to disable the first 3 gig of the hard disk (with the windows recovery) and let the disk "start" from the 3rd gig and on?
This before i send the HD back to the shop 🙁
As someone else already mentioned, there is no way to "disable" the first 3 gigs of a hard drive.
However, there is a way to ensure that the first 3 gigs of any drive will not be used, which is simply to create a 3 (or whatever number you want) gig partition and leaving it unused.
You probably have one or more bad sectors that are causing the problem. Doing a "chkdsk /r" will result in those sectors being isolated (marked bad and therefore left unused by Windows).
As far as your 64 bit Windows question, my $0.02 are,
I would plan on using Win32 as the main O/S for some time (probably another year or so), in the meantime (as someone else judiciously suggested), I would simply have another partition with Win64 installed to play with in the meantime.
What should determine your preference for Win64 over Win32 is what software will you be using the most. If the software you use the most is still 32 bits then it makes little sense to use Win64. Conversely, if the app you use most of the time is a 64 bit app (full fledged 64 bit apps are still few and far between) then it does make sense to go with Win64.
A few apparently "not so well understood" points I'd like to take the opportunity to clarify follow.
The 64bit instruction set is an
extension to the 32 bit instruction set. Therefore, 32bit programs are not emulated, they run exactly the same way as they run on a processor that is 32bit only.
About the "performance hit" which can be perceived in a Win64 installation. This comes from the fact that in protected mode (which is the mode Win32, Win64, Linux and all capable O/Ses run in) the structures shared by the CPU and the O/S must be modified to reflect the bitness of the code to be executed.
The "bitness" affects quite a number of things, among them, the effective size of the CPU registers, particularly the CS (code segment), DS (Data Segment) and the pair SS:SP (Stack segment: Stack pointer - this one is the most delicate one). It takes over 100 CPU instructions to setup all the structures properly in order to switch from one bitness to another (that's 100+ each way, one time to go to 16, 32 or 64 and another to return to the bitness it came from). That's over 200 CPU instructions per switch, the larger the number of times the switch has to occur the larger the perceived performance penalty. Obviously, on Win64, the number of switches will increase with the number of 32bit apps running.
For completeness' sake (and for those who may wonder), I didn't list 8bit protected mode because such thing does not exist.
The decision to use a 64 bit O/S should be based on the applications being used. Applications that benefit from a 64bit O/S are, among others, heavily graphical apps that must perform a lot of calculations (Photoshop, Autodesk VIZ, Maya, 3DS Max), large database systems which benefit from the larger address space (4+ billion times larger), this allows the database system to map its storage space onto linear address space which is an extremely desirable feature. Some simulators also benefit greatly (like weather simulation and, any other such kind of simulation that deals with extremely large data sets).
64bit also has disadvantages. The main one is that memory is not used as efficiently (spacewise). To clarify, 16bit code is denser than 32bit code which in turn is denser than 64bit code. What this means is that a program that uses 100KB worth of 32bit code to do its thing, will likely use 200KB+ to do the same thing in 64bit mode. A good example of this is the size of the MS C library, the 64bit version is a little bit over 3 times larger than the 32bit version (it's a bit of an extreme case though). The offshoot of that is, a 64bit setup with 1GB of memory is roughly equivalent to a 32bit setup with 300 to 400MB of memory.
By now it should be obvious that it makes no sense whatsoever to use a 64bit O/S to run MS Office or surf the net.
Consider this a 64bit post, in 64bit, my $0.02 turned into $0.06
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