I'm planning on getting one of the new 27 inch iMac's early next year and I will be installing Parallels Desktop 8 and Windows 7 probably. Now when I got my last PC which came installed initially with Windows Vista 64 bit by the system builder, I found that my USB devices and I think some software and hardware wouldn't work. I can't remember all the details has its 5 years ago almost, but I can remember plugging things in like external hard drives and usually you get a prompt installing driver, but with the 64 bit version it basically could not find the drivers if my memory serves me correctly. Now I was wondering which version of Windows (32 or 64 bit) would you recommend to install along with Parallels Desktop 8 on my iMac. I am planning to have a total of 24GB of ram (the iMac would come with 8GB, and I would be installing an additional 16GB), but the last thing I want to do is run into compatibility issues like I did with the 64 bit Windows Vista that I had. Or has things improved from a comparability point of view with 64 bit? I've never had a 64 bit version of Windows in the 10 years of owning a Windows PC (apart from when the system builder supplied my machine in error with 64 bit Vista, which I later removed once the system builder sent me the correct version). So I don't know if 64 bit is something I'm going to need or miss. It's just I thought that iMac came with a 64 bit OS ? And wondered if it would be beneficial to have a 64 bit version of Windows too. The main things I do mostly on my computer are: 1: Email 2: Surfing 3: Photo editing 4: A bit of video conversion, for if I'm wanting to convert some avi, mp4, mpeg, mkv video to a different format to either then put on my iPad, Playstation 3 or to burn to a DVD disk. 5: Using iTunes Someone did mention to me that video conversion would benefit from a 64 bit version of Windows due to been able to use more than 4GB of ram, but I wondered what you guys think of that? So in light of my uses, would there be any benefit to me getting a 64 bit version of Windows. Saying that though, it's quite possible (but I don't know yet) that I might be doing the above things in the Mac side rather than Windows, but I wouldn't know this until I started using my iMac. Also in light of what my uses would be. Has mentioned above, I would have 24GB of ram installed on my iMac (has others on other forums have said that its best to get as much ram as you can afford and this was based on my uses too) I know that if I went with a 32 bit version of Windows it wouldn't be able to use the whole 4gb of ram. So if I went with the 32 bit version. Would my uses I described and with running the VM (Parallels Desktop 8) would the 4GB limit be too low? Thanks in advance.
