Recently I decided to whipe my harddisk and setup a 64bit system. I often heard people saying that it wouldn't give you any speedup but just enable more than 4 gigs of RAM.

However this opinion must have come from a Windows machine where there is no much 64bit software avaible.  Here on Ubuntu the whole repository is compiled against AMD64 so you can have the advantages of 64bit in every application. I instantly experienced an extreme speedup of the whole desktop when using it and am now pretty happy about my decision.

One thing that bugged me was that Adobe didn't supply a 64bit Flash Player. Luckily we have two alternatives in the OpenSource world: Gnash and swfdec. Gnash ran fine and fast but had some problems with video(codecs?) on youtube. So i decided to go with swfdec which fullfills all my needs. The side effect of this issue is that I now run no proprietary software on my machine what makes me kinda happy. I am also considering moving to and AMD GPU because they have much nicer (open source) driver support.

For you guys I can just recommend moving on to 64bit. With Windows 7 also Microsofts platform should work fine (and fast) with it considering that it is the last version supplying a 32bit-derivative.

Additionally I also switched my filesystem to ext4 which gives another speedup and defragmenting on-the-fly.