Windows is already set to take advantage of multiple CPU's without doing that.

Correct. It should be unchecked by default, which should automatically detect how many CPUs/cores you have.

Would striping really help a SSD? I thought the whole point of striping was to overcome some of the deficiencies of a mechanical disk, which a SSD would not have. I could be wrong, though.

I would agree that having more RAM will yield a much more substantial boost than switching to solid state drives. RAM is so much faster, and with SuperFetch in Vista and Windows 7, it'll try too keep as much in RAM as possible so you don't have to go back to the hard drive as often. Staying in RAM as much as possible and avoiding the hard drive is always the fastest.

I actually got the tip from a 'tweak Vista' site (can't remember which one offhand) but the tweak is supposed to improve overall system/CPU performance by more evenly distributing the workload between the individual cores... well that's what was claimed.

I just put an order in today for a i7 920, with the gigabite ud5 m/b, evga gtx 280 superclocked and 3x2gb tri-channel RAM.......my days of sins lagging are over soon, this game at max wont blink.  The next step will be to dual boot with vista 64bit as yes it's good stuff (and my xp 32bit can only use 4 gb of ram anyway)...but as good as 64 bit is, I'll wait for ram to drop as there are 6 slots so I'll just add to the existing 6gb.  Final step will to be add a 2nd gtx 280 as sli but damn...it's still expensive too, one's enough for now....

I lag late game but hosting should be a breeze soon, I'm very excited....

A GTX 280 for sins...  a 8800GT would be overkill...  

yeah I only have so much money to work with, the idea is to be expandable and keep smoking for a few years.  I'll get vista in a couple of months but I figure building the hardware so I can upgrade over the next 4-5 years as needed and stay decent is better than rebuying from scratch every 2 years.  Between overclocking options, adding ram and maybe dual vid in the future, it should be easily done....but only when needed and the prices come down.  The system including a good gaming case, 1tb barracuda, upgraded heat sync and the other normal extras is like $2500 incl. tax/shipping and it's my business PC as well.  I might add 3 500gig barracudas for RAID 5 today, theie only $84 each......64mb o/s can wait a couple months.

Oh and by the way, yes I know this is overkill for sins, it not just for sins lol......

Sorry Haree78, you will have to reinstall completly. You cannot upgrade as the O/S architecture is different.

Too answer you other question you only need to format the drive with the O/S on it. However you will lose all your data. There is no need to reformat the recovery partition, infact I would recomend to leave it along considering the fact that you are working on a laptop and 64 bit drivers for it may not be available.

However before going to 64 bit you should ask youself a few questions, you said you were using a laptop. Now do you plan on going over 4 gigs of ram? About 90% of all laptops right now will not reconize more than 4 gigs of ram because most only have 2 upgrade slots. This means you would have to buy 2 4 gig chips, but again I doubt the laptops motherboard will reconize it. Second you have to worry about all the necessary drivers for you laptop to run 64 bit windows. The drivers to run hardware in 64 bit are much different than 32 bit. So check your laptop manufacturers site to see if they have 64 bit drivers available, if they don't, I wouldn't do it.

Lastly, your using a laptop, unless this is a super high end gaming laptop, you will not see hardly any benefits of going over to 64 bit. 64 bit allows the system to reconize more than a max addrassable memory space of 4 gigs, and does make the system run faster (but that depends on the hardware make up of the system). However if you have a laptop with only 3 gb ram, then leave it alone. If you do have 4 gigs of RAM and only a 32 bit system, your likely losing most of that 4th, but is it worth all that possible trouble just for that last 4th gig?  Most games will do fine with only 3, yes with more ram you can disable your page file completly, but on a laptop I wouldn't think you should be so worried about performance. Not trying be rude or anything just want give you the information and possibly save you some needlessly spent muala.

If the laptop was going to be faster form having 64 bit Vista, it probably would have came with 64 bit Vista.

Having questions or anything further on it, let know or just ask.

(Sorry had to edit for all my grammar and spelling mistakes)

I believe this will get you there; although there might be a page that will get you there faster, it doesn't appear to be as easy to find.  For one, the direct Windows Marketplace link appears to have gone dead when they remodeled it.

The more recent editions of Vista have 'Upgrade Anytime' in the 'Welcome Center'... if you have this it should give you the info you need to upgrade your current OS and the ability to purchase online.

So when Vista came out and everyone was complaining about it expanding to fill the space, actually pre-caching was a great move with very real usability benefits?

I must confess, I'd gone along with the received wisdom that "except maybe for Crysis or graphics editing", 4GB was more than I could possibly find a use for. I even felt I was being a touch extravagant when I bought it, although not as much as splashing out for a quad core (basically for SupCom).

So, at £10 a GB currently, RAM is cheap as chips. Probably be cheaper than chips soon enough what with all the food price inflation. Given that to me Crysis is Just Another Shooter and I'm no artist, would I see a benefit from a move to 8GB? Also, do people see DDR2 going up or down in price from where it is?

Yes. A program in memory is going to load and run much faster than one sitting on the hard drive.

Yes and no. For basic applications, it won't make much of a difference except make the load times a bit faster.

BUT:

• It still helps. It may not have a huge effect on your overall productivity, but it is nice to see Word 2007 load instantly rather than waiting a few seconds.
• Multimedia applications are becoming more popular. More people than ever have cell phones that take pictures and most digital cameras are capable of recording video. YouTube and Flikr are very popular. The demand for photo and video editing is going up.
  
• Games are using more memory than ever. More and more games are demanding higher and higher resolution textures. Higher resolution textures need more memory. Stardock has repeatedly said that it will be creating 64 bit games in the future. Crysis was only the beginning. I can guarantee you you'll be seeing more "Crysis" like games in the future. Even games that are not the FPS genre are going to be using more memory.
  

As long as mass production of DDR2 continues, it will go down in price. But if it's as cheap as chips, I'd say go ahead and buy as much as your motherboard can handle.

I love having the 8 GB RAM. I can currently run an editor for oblivion, that essentially loads the entire games contents into memory, load and play the game while the editor is running (having to quite to save changes of course). On top of that, have internet explorer downloading a new 100mb mod, while listening to streaming music over the internet while all the while defragging one of the harddrives im not using.

I have disabled disk caching completly and it works great.

I can even load up a sins saved game where there are me and 5 AI players with full fleet size, then load up oblivion or Crysis and play them at the same time, Its great. Admittedly my frame rate will drop a little in Crysis but is so fast originally thats its still quite playable. However thats more so the video card capability on that effects that  as I am still not using more than 5 or 6 GB RAM.

I have never used up all 8 GB of my RAM, but I am sure someone who does video editing, or sound editing probably would. Or maybe running server apps in the back ground while playing an intensive game might do it too.

As for solid state disk, their read time is great, their write time sucks, so if you wanted one to just dump your paging file on, like I originally thought of doing, it would actually slow things down. Also if you check the specs on most SSD their seek time and read is actually slower than the 10,000 RPM raptors. So as of right now, I am staying away from them. Durability wise they are superioir and read time vs most "normal" harddrives they are better. For "enthusiast" speed however they are lacking.

That's only for the boot-up.  It doesn't affect the system once it's running.

The trick with multi-core systems is that the SOFTWARE needs to be written multi-threaded to take advantage of it.  Therefore, for most people 2 cores is plenty as one core is busy with you currently active program while the other is handling OS background tasks, widgets, your music player, etc.

Those of us who are using 4 or 8 core machines are doing so because we have high end 3D software or video editing software, for example, that actually can peg all of our cores to the maximum when rendering.  For anyone else, 4+ cores would be overkill and it would make more sense to spend the same money on a dual core CPU with a higher clock speed than a 4 core with a lower clock speed.

BTW, you'll find that 99% of windows programs are single-threaded.