Advice on changing to 64 bits

[Roger Heflin]

Klaus-Peter Schrage wrote:
> Up to last week, I had Fedora running in subsequent versions 2 or so to 
> 10 on my old Pentium 4 system.
> 
> Now I have a rather recent new desktop computer with much of the latest 
> and greatest hardware: Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 with 4 GB RAM, harddrive 
> with lots of Gagabytes and so on.
> 
> Thinking about changing to 64 bits architecture (I have the i386 
> installation dvd, but not yet the i86_64 one), I was astonished how 
> little I found on pros and cons. So what would you advise?
> 
> 1. Changing to 64 bits is a must for you.
> 2. You will benefit from it.
> 3. Keep your hands off, stay with 64 bits.
> 4. ...
> 
> I should mention that I want to use virtualization (KVM, VMware Server), 
> and that the processor has Intel's hardware vitualization capabilities.
> 
> Thanks for any pointers.
> Klaus
> 

Something to note, I don't know why but the 64-bit versions of Firefox 
and Thunderbird use a lot more memory than the 32-bit versions,  I was 
originally running a 32-bit f9 with 3GB ram w/2GB swap, and almost 
never got into swap, after switching to 10 64-bit, I had to add 2GB 
more of swap and was getting deep into the 4GB of swap, I uninstalled 
64-bit firefox/openoffice and thunderbird and put in the 32-bit 
version and the memory usage went down quite a bit.   The memory usage 
was a at least 50% more.