Bought a replacement CPU the other week and had a chat with the sales person. Got a case with power supply, no keyboard, no mouse, a mother board with a processor. I told the sales person I was assembling with some spare parts. I have spare SATA hard disks, memory and a (256MB) PCI-E video card. He asked me what the memory speed was, and I said 400, at which point he mentioned that it might not work with the newer board and processor. Okay, got that. I added memory to the bunch.
And then he asked what OS I used. I asked why, how would that affect my purchase. He mentioned that 32-bit Windows uses only up to 3GB (or thereabouts) and a 4GB memory would be hobbled. He suggested that I install 64-bit Windows instead, since the processor was 64-bit anyway.
It got me thinking about it a bit. Getting home, I backed up my files and proceeded to install and re-format one hard disk for Ubuntu Linux 9.10. I had used 9.04 till then, and was very much satisfied with how fast the PC boots up. I didn't install the 64-bit version, but still Linux was able to detect and make use of all 4GB memory. (On linux, the command on the terminal is "free -m" which shows memory usage.)
Oh well. Maybe I'll be installing Ubuntu 9.10 (64-bit) another time. But for now, I'm happy with what I got.
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