Vista - New laptop-Vista 64 bit or wait for Win 7?

Hello all,
I am shopping around for a new laptop and I have decided to go with Dell. I was disappointed to find that most of the choices involve getting Vista Home Premium 64-bit. I have Vista Home Premium 32-bit and like it, but I have heard of problems with 64 bit such as program incompatablility, instability, and problems with updates etc. I am a middle range user who knows what is inside my computer and basically how it works, but doesn't generally 'tweak' it too much. I'd like to have 2 machines with the same OS (just once and have just got used to the Vista program.
Is Vista 64 as much of a pain as I've heard?

Also, if I do go with 64 bit, how much memory is recommended? I have 4Gigs on my 32 bit machine and it likes it fine.. but what's on offer at Dell, 4 Gigs seems to be minimum for 64 bit.
Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Thanks

Hi; I have Vista Home premium 64 bit on a new HP desktop. I have been on HP support 4 times to resolve an issue; folders on my portable hd appear as "read only" on the vista machine and cannot be changed.

No one has been able to resolve the issue, this may just be a bad windows install, or some sort of other annomolly. The 64 bit version is not very stable; the computer occasionally freezes or otherwise locks up.

The folks in Redmond should be ashamed of this effort. This computer is very close to going back in the box and back to Sams club.

I would wait.

Brian

Hello Peppurr,

Well, what can I say is the 64bit operating system is very similar to the 32bit one. It is more secure, faster and stable in my opinion. That is true not always there are 64bit software equivalents of the popular programs, but you can use the 32bit application on it without problem.
The 4GB memory can be used fully and is recommended on 64bit OS, but it's not minimum. There are 64bit machines that run with 3GB without problem. Usualy the memory usage is from 1.3GB to 2Gb unless you use RAM hungry applications to processing video and photos. More about this please read here.

Martee has responded well in my opinion.
I liked the article you referred to Martee particularly the final sentence
"......one thing is for certain - 64-bit is here to stay, it's going to grow, and it's more than just the RAM. "

IMHO Vista 64-bit is not & has not been a pain.This happy user has not had any incompatibility, instability, or problems with updates etc thus far! [Perhaps that may yet change.]

4 GB should be ample.
Let us know what you decide on.

That's the HP sotftware doing that, it did the same on XP when I got an HP destkop 3 years ago, and I keep hearing people having trouble with their HP computer. It's their software. I still have the same computer and have moved to Vista x64 and it's very very stable (never crashed once) and have yet to have a compatibility problem. I've been on Vista for almost a year now.

Hello all,
Thanks for your input.
64-bit is looking better and so does the Dell deal that says 'no payments til Aug 2010'
I guess I can update both machines to Win 7 in future..

If your computer (regardless of wether its a desktop or laptop) has 4gb of ram,
I highly recommend using vista 64bit over 32bit. Otherwise +- 1/3 of your RAM will just be sitting there being unused.

win7 is supposed to be more stable, more reliable and less resource intensive as vista so I highly recommend switching to win7 when that comes out.

I personally am quite content with vista business 64bit so I probably won't switch to win7 untill the first service pack release or something.

Ayp is right. right now, i'd still use vista till a service pack comes out for windows 7. you never know what the retail windows 7 will have in store for you (just like what happened to the vista launch).

My laptop came with Home Premium 64-bit and it runs better and faster than the 32-bit Business I installed on another partition of the laptop. All pc manufactures have junkware than messes with the pc when purchased but when removed makes the pc awesome.

I got rid of all the HP stuff the same day and speed increased more than "10-fold". I recommend Vista 64 all the way..it is by far better at everything, more stable and the like.

I have been testing 7 for a while and I am not changing over till service pack 1 at least. There will be issues at release as there was with all OS's in existance until time progresses to fix those issues that arise.

Hope this helps.

I also forgot to say IF you already have Vista, dont go through the trouble of getting windows 7.

Its a marginal update from vista with a few minor new looks, but DX11 is supposedly coming out for both OSes in the near future. Thats what has me content with vista right now.