What OS?

Ok so I ordered windows xp sp3 off of newegg oem and just found out it is 32bit and I have 4gigs of ram. just have to say that I was freaking out because
newegg's return policy will not refund oem discs but they said they would sense it is still in transit and so now that you have the details here are my questions.
(I will be using this for gaming)
1. Should I just stick with it? i am only losing 1 gig of ram.
2. does 32 bit lower performence (can it play games at all?)
3. If i should get somthing else what? (vista, 7)
4. I want it to play some old games like counter strike source but also new games and upcoming.
5. I picked xp because it took less ram. (I only have 4) should I try and get Xp 64bit?

Thanks for your time

sincerely, Andrew

32-bit means that it can access a maximum of 4GB of RAM. If you need to access beyond that, you'll need to go with the 64-bit OS.

The proliferation of 64-bit CPUs and OS' in the consumer market is a very recent thing and if anything games will operate on a 64-bit machine pretending to be 32-bit..

32-bit doesn't lower performance one bit..and unless a game specifically demands it XP is a perfectly good choice. I'd definitely skip Vista all together and should you need/want to upgrade, Windows 7 is the right choice..

Regards

You are fine with what you got. No worries.

Actually, on 32-bit Windows, a certain amount of that 4GB will be allocated out - first for the video RAM on the graphics card, and secondly for driver space. So, in effect, you'll be able to address around 3GB - and that's fine. Not even the most power-hungry games will need much more than 2GB of RAM.

Now, if you were running an OS with a larger footprint (like Windows Vista or 7), that would be a different story.

Ok I guess I will stick with xp thanks for all the suggestions!