I have a intel 2 quad core 2.7ghz and 4 g ram for this reason i want to upgrade to vista 64 can i do this or will i have to stick with 32bit my mother board is asus p5b i have ran a scan to test vista compatability, it passed for everything but it doesnt say whether its for 32 or 64bit os

You can do that, your hardware is more than adequate, but the driver support for 64bit is terrible. Currently almost nothing is made with a 64bit OS in mind. I would stick with Vista 32, but you always have the option to upgrade when the time is right if you buy Vista Ultimate. ~bc

my os only recognises 2049mb of the 4096mb due to the 32 bit os some people claim to beable to get it to use over 3g on 32 bit os ive tried disabling mem remap but this didnt give much back in my system it shows total physical mem 4096mb available physical mem 2.08gb total viurtual mem 2.00 gb available virtual mem 1.96gb page file space 5.94gb any ideas on how to increase it to over 3gb like other people have the only advice ive really had was to upgrade to x64 os

that is the only thing to do is to upgrade your operating system to 64. I have had zero driver issues when I upgraded to 64. Jim R

Microshaft implemented a 32bit memory addressing scheme. The actual hardware is 36 bit wide adress buss and can address a total of around 64GB's. Why did MS limit the RAM? Who knows. The 64-bit thing is bull, as even the core2's are NOT true 64-bit cpus they still have a 36bit address bus and the same 64gb limit. So MS's excuse is to upgrade to the 64-bit version of Vista, what a load of #$(*@! The 32-bit version of vista will also look and see what other RAM you have in your system and cut your available RAM down, ie if you have a 256mb video card, it will cut .25gb's out of the total 4gb's of RAM. What a pile of #@($*#@

I installed both the 32 and 64bit versions of Vista and I found that not only did I get all of my RAM (3GB), Vista ran better in x64 mode. I upgraded to Vista a couple of months ago and have had no driver problems at all. Hope this helps.

Thanks for all your responses i to have now update to vista x64 ultimate i now see all my ram 4096 and it runs really nice. I have had only one problem which was the trend micro anti spyware is not supported on X64 but thats no biggy, all my games work going back to ghost recon original to crysis which runs so much better on this os. Ive even convinced a long time xp fan who swore never to upgrade to vista especially vista x64 to upgrade he to is having no problems this os is very good if things change ill let you know. Thanks