Which OS is better, 32 or 64bit?

[Antonio Marques]

Hi,

Sorry if this isn't the right place to ask, but I couldn't find the information anywhere.
I'm going to use Silverfast on a new computer. I am wondering what operating system architecture is better, 32 or 64 bit.
From what I understand, Silverfast now supports 64 bit for both Mac and Windows. My Reflecta 7200 RPS seems to be supported too.

So my question is, does 64 bit have any advantage? 64 bit is supposed to give access to more RAM and speed up mathematical operations, such as are required by image or video processing algorithms. But I haven't seen definite opinions on that subject. Have you made any sort of comparison yourselves, that can establish whether Silverfast works faster on 64 or in 32 bit, or if it's all the same?

Thank you,
Antonio Marques

[RAG]

Hello Antonio,

I'm a user like you and haven't done any side by side comparison, but logic dictates 64-bit would be the way to go if your new computer has a 64-bit operating system. For one thing 32-bit applications had a 2GB memory usage limitation and I can tell you that on a number of occasions I hit the memory wall working on large images. It was frustrating trying to work on an image and getting ainsufficientnt memory message!