Worth upgrading to 64bit?

[ralphy]

I'm running 32bit Linux Lite on a 10-year-old laptop. Not sure why I chose the 32bit installation - it was some time ago and not important for my purposes back then - but I'm now trying to get more performance out of the machine.

I've just upgraded the RAM from 2 to 4GB, and am now wondering whether I should upgrade the OS to the 64bit version, which poses a couple of questions:

• Is a 64bit upgrade likely to make much difference to performance (for example to better exploit the RAM upgrade)?
  
• Is there an easy way of upgrading, rather than starting from scratch? (as a relative Linux novice I'd rather take an easy option)
  

My processor is a Mobile AMD Sempron 3200+, which lscpu confirms is 64-bit capable.

Any thoughts / advice?

With 4GB RAM I don't see why you wouldn't go with a 64 Bit OS. 64 Bit is widely adopted nowadays and some are moving to 64 Bit only... don't need to go far, Google Chrome is only supported in 64Bit Linux versions for example.

I run a 64Bit VM with 1.5GB RAM (Linux Lite) and I abuse that machine... daily. Even with maxed out swap it just smokes (SSD storage though).

Then again it is a matter of preference at this point for you. Do you have everything setup and working properly in your x32 OS? Are you comfortable with it? Then leave it alone, you will not see a performance increase by moving to a 64 bit OS in such hardware, specially for an old laptop.

The main points between x32 and x64 today are pretty much down to RAM access, efficiency, virtual memory allocation and security features. 64 bit provides more of all previously mentioned but how much is that needed in your 10 years old limited hardware is really up for you to decide. I wouldn't bother to reinstall a 64 bit OS in your case.

Cheers!