Photoshop & Lightroom on 64bit vs 32bit

[rouxster]

Has anyone had any experience with Photoshop and\Lightroom on both a 32 bit PC and a 64bit PC. I want to upgrade my RAM on my Vista machine from 2 GB to 4 GB. Being that I can only use 3 GB on my 32 bit Vista, I want to know if it is worh it to upgrade to 64 bit. If the performance is the same, I will just suck it up and stick with my 3 GB of memmory. Thanks

Ryan

[tmphillips]

I don't use Adobe products, but I use some other intensive programs (aka hogs)... and I haven't used Vista32, but went straight from XP32 to Vista64 (for the same reason, to get the full bang out of my 4 gigs of ram) and thus am a witness to definite performance increases with Vista64. and so I am willing to bet you'd see some of that benefit with the Adobe apps..

[jay_soft]

I was running lightroom and CS3 with 2gb of ram and pre-vista windows (my mind has gone blank to what version that was), I'm now running it with 4gb and 64bit vista. The improvement has been fairly stratospheric, although that might in some part be to the rest of the machine being entirely new and the quad core processor!

Can you get an upgrade from 32bit to 64 or do you have to buy the product again entirely? If you can upgrade and can just buy an extra 1gb stick to put in your machine its probably worth it.I'm not sure it would be if you had to but vista at normal price plus buy 4gb of ram.

[rouxster]

Originally Posted by jay_soft

Can you get an upgrade from 32bit to 64 or do you have to buy the product again entirely? If you can upgrade and can just buy an extra 1gb stick to put in your machine its probably worth it.I'm not sure it would be if you had to but vista at normal price plus buy 4gb of ram.

The upgrade won't cost me anything because we have a volume license at work with home use rights (very nice perk). If any of you are familiar with wiping out your PC and reloading an OS, the process is simple, but the pain is getting all of the software, drivers and settings back on your PC. I have a quad core now and it runs very good, speed-wise. Lightroom takes about 10 seconds at most to open and Photoshop is about the same. So, I'm not sure if it is worth the upgrade.