Vista - Laptop + World of Warcraft + 64bit vs 32bit?

I'm shopping for a new very portable laptop. 90% of my use on the laptop is really going to be web surfing and documents. I've toyed with getting a little netbook. But I know that if I have the laptop I am going to want to login to WoW at least some when I'm stuck out of town ... No raiding, but quick auction checks and questing maybe.

Since I'm also keeping my costs low, I am trying to find out what is the better value for what I am looking for.

My choices are between:

Dell Inspiron 13 - 1318 (Cheaper)
> 128MB NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS
> Vista 32bit
> 3 GB RAM

or

Dell XPS M1330
> 128MB NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS
> Vista 64bit
> 4 GB RAM

Am I going to see a big enough performance difference going with the 64bit system and 4gigs of RAM .... or should I save myself some money and just go 32bit with less RAM.

I have had that video card on one of my laptops.
And definitely go with the ram if you can, but don't buy it from dell, buy it online for 1/4 the cost. Installing it is pretty easy if you follow the instructions in the Manuel.
It is a great video card, under vista 64/32 you get about the same frame rate. around 16-20fps or so.
If you get XP it will run much faster.
Under either though you can raid no problem really and pvp, the framerate will be between 10-14 though just to warn you. But Ive raided successfully with less in molten core lol

The real big difference game wise for me between vista 64/32 and XP 32 was random lockup /freezes crashes.

XP 32 random crashes in alot of games/ sound glitches / crashes that were unrecoverable when running new buggy gaming software.

Vista 32 crashes, but not as hard as xp most of the time you can get back to the desktop at least. Slower gaming performance but better crash protection was nice.

Vista 64 Almost never crash out so hard you cant get back to the desktop. less sound glitching in new games (unpatched, brand new you are the beta tester fun) Less crashing the OS in general. In fact even with all the buggy beta software I run for testing, I havent crashed the OS in a month. Usually under XP I crash it a few times a day.

XP is faster graphically, it may be that the drivers are written better, there is less overhead or the hardware itself is just more happy with xp.


As a side note: The dell support team does not in any way or form like to support vista x64, when I originally got my vostro laptop they did, then they pulled the support for it and all the drivers from the website. I have to use the XPS X64 drivers for my vostro now its the only way I can get the chipset drivers to work right.

So if I end up downgrading to XP, there would be no reason to get the 4gigs of RAM anyway?

I've been looking at dell's outlet stock ... so I don't have a lot of options in how they are configured. But there was a good $200 dollar difference between most of the Dell Inspiron 13 - 1318 and the Dell XPS M1330 Mainly attributed to 3gigs vs 4 gigs and Vista 32 vs Vista 64 ...

Since it seems like such a small gap I wanted to know how noticeable the performance difference.

Sadly I kept doing web searches for this and was coming up with articles and posts from 2006/2007 and was hoping with new patches and service packs that Vista has some real improvement from those posts.

Thanks for the info, looks like I will just go cheaper and reload the Laptop with XP