Marketing hype aside, the issue is that Microsoft has made it difficult for driver writers to provide 64 bit versions (vs. 32 bit versions). 64 Bit Linux (or Solaris) run just fine on the HP 64 bit laptops.

As to 32 vs. 64, the 64 bit chips outperform their 32 bit equivalents even when running a 32 bit OS.

I filed complaints with the FTC and Florida DOCA this afternoon after receiving a phone call from HP this afternoon where the guy took a totally flippant attitude with this issue while raising the following points:

1) I can buy a sportscar capable of 300mph, but it's not legal for me to drive it on the highway

2) we market and sell the 64 bit processor but only support its use as a 32 bit processor

3) 64 bit drivers will not be made available now or in the future - even though we continue to sell 64 bit processor machines

In a nutshell, besides coming across as a flippant a-hole, he essentially confirmed that their approach to 64 bit computing is pure marketing hype and contains no substance a consumer could actually use.

Florida DOCA is usually pretty aggressive - they went after Sprint when I had a billing dispute that would not get resolved and it resulted in Sprint doing backflips to help me. Maybe they will teach HP the difference between right and wrong.

I will update the thread as new info arrives...

Seriously, If you're using Photoshop, I'd wait for CS3 to be released and then get a Intel Core2 Duo based Macintosh. Adobe generally does their best work for the Mac platform, and I see that unlikely to change.

If you definitely want to stick with Windows, you're not going to see much difference between a 64-bit or 32-bit version of Windows unless you also can find a 64-bit optimized version of Photoshop (or 64-bit versions of the given filters/plugins you're most dependent on for the slowdown). I'm not aware of such a thing.

In general, when ScottC says:
he's correct, but each of the Athlon 64 X2 and Core 2 Duo lines is a pretty big line of chips, each crossing a big range of clock speeds. Core 2 Duos are faster clock for clock than Athlon 64 X2 across the board, but by how much depends on the benchmark. A bottom-of-the-line E4300 (1.6ghz) or E6300 (1.86ghz) Core 2 Duo is still going to be slower than a middle-of-the-line or higher AMD chip.

Which is largely true for the entire consumer hardware industry.

Have you actually tried installing XP 64 bit on the machine?

After what Dell enterprise sales did to my last employer (and me, by trickle down suffering), I should know never to trust a hardware maker ever again.
Yes I did, but I was only able to cobble together a hodgepodge of drivers, including a couple drivers written by hobbyists. Some of the key drivers, such as the touchpad and wireless card were unavailable or too buggy.

That's only accurate if the 64-bit chips have a fatter pipe to memory, or have other differences than the 32-bit chip that give it a performance edge.

When you recompile the OS for a 64-bit implementation, all the places that stored pointers in data structures have to be modified to hold a 64-bit data value rather than a 32-bit data value. (And depending on the programming model, programmers have to find all the places where they assumed that a pointer would fit in a 32-bit integer sized data value, and fix those as well.)

The same thing can happen to integers and long integers, depending on the data model that the OS vendor chooses to use for these data types in the 64-bit OS. That itself ends up making the 64-bit OS larger, plus the addition of any 64-bit programming APIs that don't exist in the 32-bit version. The difference can be 3% - 5% slower or more, depending on the implementation, when run on the same exact chips and depending on the application load. Some things can, in fact, run faster. I didn't say that the difference was huge, and for most people it's negligible.

Since all the chips are now effectively 64-bit chips, there really are no 32-bit equivalents to compare them to. The performance difference is effectively masked by the incremental speed jumps and cache line sizes and larger caches used in the 64-bit chips. All this makes it tough to do an apples to apples comparison.

-David

Even worse, the 4GB max memory is partitioned between kernel (2 GB) and application (2 GB), thus further limiting how much data a 32-bit application can directly process in RAM. You can set a boot flag for Windows 2000/2003 to allow a 3 GB application allocation, at the expense of reducing the kernel space.