hi i am using a duel core 32 bit windows vista business edition and i love blender but often get very frustrated when my files get two big and crash i don’t like this one bit i hate sacrificing detail especially because i mostly model rocks and minerals which have incredibly intricate fractal structure that eats memory for breakfast i am willing to pay 4000-5000 dollars according to mike pan 64 bit unlocks a huge memory boost because one program can use almost all the memory i plan to pack the new computer with as much memory as possible . please tell me if this whole 64bit thing is actually right and how much will it boost performance is it worth it (i hope its really cool) ?what graphics card should i get? and finely is there a limit to the memory blender can use on 64 bits:confused:
yes if you use windows 7 64 bit and Blender 64 bit which is the catch… as there is not a blender 64 bit 2.49.
go with the i7 processor… it’s awesome.
I have:
i7 920
6gb ram
512 HD video
and 1.65 TB of storage.
windows 7 64 bit.
I run blender 2.49 32 bit with no problem… I did max out… (movement was getting choppy, so hard to do anything) but my Polly count was insanely high) but remember that was with 32 bit blender… so it wasn’t using all of my ram…
Sorry mate, but you got no clue what you´r talking about - no offense, but if you give advice be sure your words have any ground.
Max out? Doing what? Rendering? Sculpting? Physics simulations? Particle calculation? I can think of numerous tasks for your machine where it dies coughing bits and bytes 
First off, there is at least one 64b windows blender, even an official one:
http://download.blender.org/release/Blender2.49b/blender-2.49b-win64-python26.zip
If you need more specialized 64b builds, you can find more on:
http://www.graphicall.org
For the OP´s woes, dualcore is not specific enough, but I guess you got either an Athlon64x2 or Core2Duo?
Both are 64b capabale. All you need is a 64b operationg system to utilize more than 4GiB of memory, which is all you need to buy, as I suggest to use Linux for sculpting or other memory heavy tasks.
Blender under linux with hardware opengl boosts your viewport performance by 20%+
And for polygon heavy tasks you don´t need any Ci7. Rotations, Translations and stuff are not utilizing such a processor. All you need for viewport performance is either a Quadro or FireGL Graphicscard, or just some powerful consumer card like a 5850/5870/GTX470/GTX480 - the world is yours 
hth
64-bit linux won’t cost you a dime, and you can install it on your 64-bit PC.
Its like learning how to use a computer all over again you feel like a 5 year I don’t like the way its so hard to run blender I am sure theirs some @$#% you do in the terminal but its too hard I will try too learn but I think windows rocks but open source rocks too:spin: