For those interested; 

I have the Vista Home BASIC edition 32 bit and the 64 bit.  You must order the x64 for about $10.00 additional, to cover shipping and handling. You can upgrade Home Basic 32 to 64, to Home Premium, and Ultimate, but not Business.  And you cannot use the Virtual PC for Home Basic.  It does not matter since I have additional third party software that can do what the Ultimate edition can do.  

The 32 bit system has the most support for software, drivers, and hardware, but lacks the security features of the x64, so it is said.  Others say that the x64 is faster than the x86.

Since, I am wary of upgrading 32 with 64, and taking the chance of mixed drivers and failed software, I decided to install the Vista 64 into Win XP SP2.  I was told the OS was not compatible for install, and directed to do a reboot and clean install.  Which I did, and the contents of the partition were moved into a Folder named Windows.old.  The whole installation took about 15 minutes.  I used the Microsoft approved drivers and did not install the retail versions.

I have finished installing Vista x64 other software and running Vue retail to see if there are any performance improvements.

The x64 system uses two different folders one for x64 and another for x86 that is run as if Virtual software.  There are also two swap files.

The graphic software I have is supposed to be x64 compatible, however, when installing most of this software, it was installed in the x86 Folder.  So it works on the x64 system but is not fully x64.  My U.S. Robotics Modem software is fully x64 and installed in the correct Folder.

Vue worked as expected, with the exception of importing Poser, and would not recognize my graphics card.  I opened the preferences, and unticked the Test my Video Card, and reduced some of the features to create less strain on the system resources, the same as for the 32 bit, nothing anyone else could not do.

After that Vue worked fine.  I saw little performance improvement over the x86 OS, about 5 to 7 percent on average.  The x64 handles small files about the same as the x86, but larger files faster.  Everything else was pretty much the same. 

Ironically, the only software that seemed to improve was my Carrara 5.1, which rendered a scene in 15 minutes that normally took one and a half hours.  It seemed a more efficient use of the Duel Processor and OpenGl.

Since most of the software is still 32 bit compatible and runs virtual in the x64 environment, until software goes x64, you make the call.

jankeen.com