I have a 3 year old laptop that came with Vista32 and had al sorts of problems. Then I installed Win7 x64 and all problems were gone, except for a couple of compatibility issues, IF I were to run certain programs x64 mode (i.e. for example IE8 x64 - Adobe flash player). Most programs you use in Win7 x64 are still x86 (WMP, IE8, Office 2007, uTorrent etc.), except for essential system processes. So everything stays the same plus more RAM becomes available. Now hardware is a different story... Not all hardware is compatible with Vista/Win7. Or so it was a good while back. My 2 cents..