| Squilliam said: Also 64bit uses more ram than 32bit - I think aprox 20%? So the differences between 3.2gb and 4gb are a wash when you take that into account. Furthermore 64bit vista kills 16 bit compatibility for security reasons so its more secure but on the other hand you can't run pretty much any game designed in the mid 90's or before. |
It depends how you define 20%. After bootup, my 64 bit installation uses approximately 20% more memory than my 32 bit install (although it isn't a fair comparison because the machines have different amounts of memory). However, a large amount of that is because windows requires loading of both 32 and 64 bit libraries. After the main libraries are loaded, unless something else requires both 32 and 64 libraries of the same thing for some reason, the memory usage shouldn't be all that much more. All data types are still the same size in 64 bit programs (assuming you're comparing an indentically compiled program without different code paths for 32/64) except for pointers, which generally aren't going to add massive amount of memory usage.
As for 16 bit applications, DOSBox handles pretty much all of your needs (and in most cases you'd want to use DOSBox anyway under a 32 bit OS).
