64-bit Advisable With 1gb Of Ram?

Yo,

My Inspiron 6400 (e1550 in the US, I think) notebook should arrive by friday and I'm thinking about installing Suse 64-bit on it. It has 1GB of RAM.

Now, I've read somewhere, I think in the german ct-magazine, that running an OS/application in 64-bit requires more memory than in 32-bit.
My question is, does anyone have any experience how much more it usually is and does the increased use of memory have more inpact on the perfomance than the gain through 64-bit?
My uninformed guess is that heavy multitasking (which I like to do alot) could hurt the perfomance of a 64-bit machine due to the computer having to access the swap-partition.

Also, can anyone confirm me that the "Intel® Pro Wireless 3945 802.11a/b/g " works with Suse x86-64?

Thanks in advance

The increased memory use comes not because of anything inherent in 64-bit, but because some apps have to be run in 32-bit mode due to compatibility issues, e.g. Firefox and the proprietary flash plugin, which then causes a set of 32-bit shared libraries to be loaded.

Drivers with 32-bit blobs may also force your hand. I know the 3945 is supported on a 32-bit laptop but I don't know about 64-bit.

I have 1 GB of memory and it's fine. Seldom gets above 600MB actual usage.

'kay I'm going to try the x86-64 version then.
Thanks!

I've got two gigs of RAM, and I rarely go higher than 51% of that... and the 51% comes when I have like 8-10 different 32-bit and 64-bit programs running at once. 1G will be plenty.

I am pretty sure that your wi-fi card will work because I am pretty sure they have a native driver for the intel pro wireless cards. If it does work in 32-bit mode then it should work in 64-bit version because you could alway use the 32bit driver or if you had the source you could change the CFlags to use 64 bit libraries instead of 32bit or you could compile it on your system and that should do the trick. But either way, it should work even if you have to use it in 32bit mode similar to firefox if he's right and there is a driver for it. I don't know about whether there is a driver or not though...I will just take his word for it.

I have the 64-bit version of OpenSuse 10.2 , and only 512MB of RAM, and it works fine. It does, however, use a little bit of swap all the time.