Nah. 32-bit.

XP64 wasn’t widely supported, if you need 64-bit application support, use 7.

AFAIK, there isn't much point to running 64-bit XP.

Games from the Windows XP era will run fine on 32-bit XP. Running the 32-bit version of XP also gives you backwards compatibility with 16-bit Windows games, should you need it.

It wasn't until the 2010s when a 64-bit OS started to become a requirement. At which point you're into the Windows 7 era.

Agreed with all of the above. The Vista era is when most hardware started to come with both 32-bit and 64-bit drivers. By late Vista era, I think large OEMs (Dell/HP/Acer/etc) had started preinstalling 64-bit on consumer machines. Business machines stuck to 32-bit for a bit longer, I think due to the need for compatibility with DOS/16-bit Windows/etc apps.

64-bit XP is more a proof of concept than anything.

I ran XP x64 at home and at work in period, I wanted to make the most of the Athlon 64s I had at the time. I seem to remember that once driver support was there it was really good. I don't remember any significant issues at the time. I wasn't much of a gamer by that stage though.

I agree with the above though, stick to 32bit. Just wanted to a add practical experiencepoint of view.

Thanks to everyone fot the advice. I will stay with the 32 bit version. My system is running extremely well why ruin it, right? Thanks again!

i ran 64bit xp for awhile on an early lga775 board. the hardware drivers were not so hard to find. from a games perspective 32 vs 64bit was a wash, but there was 1 unexpected benefit of 64bit: i found the current roland scva software synthesizer 64bit vst is compatible with xp64 whereas the 32bit vst will only register on vista or higher (i presume vista, but actually have only run it under win7/10).

paired with a vst driver it's a nice have for dosbox or the windows command prompt with vdmsound to re-route port 330 to the windows midi mapper.

I still run XP64 on one computer, but I concur that for games it could be some issues; most common problem was the installers that were 16-bit, and had to be updated, while the games often worked once installed. Some old games had the same issue with copy-protection also being incompatible and never got updated to work with XP64bit.

I ran XP Pro 64 for years and it was great I found it alot more stable than than regular 32 bit. The scheduler is alot better with hexa core or greater CPUs. I never had any issues finding proper drivers for my hardware. You can always dual boot them for fun.

If you do not need to run older 16bit apps then the 64bit version should be ok but if you ever want to run some 16bit app (including some odd DOS app) then 64bit is not for you.
I have a box specific to XP 32bit for that reason, I need to be able to run both 32bit and 16bit apps and a Win9x machine just is not up to the task of doing it proper IMHO.
If all you do is run some games then maybe you do not need 32bit but there is no "ohh this is better" for 32bit stuff between the two other than the 32bit backward compatibility for true DOS stuff.

XP x64 did have a lot of problems with drivers in the early days but this didnt last long, it did get a reputation for not being as widely supported as XP 32 because it isnt. You wont have any problem with main base system devices of course, so people assume there is no problem with drivers, but there are many a bluetooth card or capture card that doesnt have XP 64 drivers for it, even though it does come with XP 32 and Win7 drivers.
These devices are not easy to find anymore but they are out there. So because of that CP 64 is not as widely supported as XP 32 was.

If youre running and using the features of XP MCE then I would say no stay with MCE as there is no MCE version of XP 64.
Im not sure if the BetasIRC AnyMCEv2 will install into XP 64, (if you dont know what that means then it doesnt matter)

Depends on the hardware you have as to whether you will see any performance increase or not, if it doesnt then you can always just go back to XP 32.

I've only had software firewalls not being available at the time I jumped to XP64, but that became a non-problem pretty fast. I didn't need NTVDM for dos/w16 stuff as DOSBox was helping those migration pains already. It's the software/driver avail issue mutual with Vista complaints around 05-06 but quickly became moot by the time of the Mojave campaign

The biggest problem at the time was driver support. But now, for retro purposes, most XP/Vista/Win7 era hardware will have XP-64 drivers available.

Windows XP 64-bit is just an inferior edition of Windows 2003 Server. So might as well install better version, if you go 64-bit route.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2023-12-04, 07:03:

Windows XP 64-bit is just an inferior edition of Windows 2003 Server. So might as well install better version, if you go 64-bit route.

That's pretty much equally true for regular XP too. They just stripped out the good parts of server 2003 like actually useable PAE.

Windows XP was released before Windows 2003.

XP 64bit was released after windows 2003, it is based off of 2003 and was released so devs and enthusiasts would have a 64bit workstation OS.

Shadzilla wrote on 2023-12-03, 20:01:

I ran XP x64 at home and at work in period, I wanted to make the most of the Athlon 64s I had at the time. I seem to remember that once driver support was there it was really good. I don't remember any significant issues at the time. I wasn't much of a gamer by that stage though.

Same here.
As a software developer, I was an early adopter of 64-bit Windows, porting codebases over to 64-bit.
As long as you had the right hardware with proper drivers, it worked fine, and any 32-bit Windows stuff I threw at it, ran fine.
I had a 32-bit version of XP installed as well, just in case, but I rarely had to boot into it.

It was interesting when early 64-bit builds of games arrived, such as Half-Life 2 and Far Cry.
But yea, it's more of a novelty. 32-bit Windows will work fine, and won't have issues with software that comes with a 16-bit installer (although you can work around that with stuff like winevdm).

It does support more than 4 GiB of memory, I assume? That would probably have been an advantage for some people at the time?

DosFreak wrote on 2023-12-04, 11:10:

XP 64bit was released after windows 2003, it is based off of 2003 and was released so devs and enthusiasts would have a 64bit workstation OS.

Indeed. Technically XP x64 was not the same as XP x86.
The internal version number of XP x64 was higher (5.2 instead of 5.1), since it was based off a newer kernel and API.
This also means that XP x64 supports some APIs that XP x86 does not.