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I'm planing to ditch Katya (gnome) for LMDE Xfce edition when the final respins are ready. Currently I've been checking 32bit and 64bit XFCE isos and I can not decide which one is better for my machine (Toshiba A300 1-gn with 3gigs of ram) and would there be any noticeable difference in actual user experience.
The ram usage in 32 and 64bit live sessions looks like this:
running system monitor: 144 vs 220 MB RAM
+Firefox displaying homepage: 180 vs 270 MB
playing youtube video: 225 vs 355 MB

Also I ran available benchmarks.
32bit:
CPU Blowfish
This Machine 2267 MHz 16.286
CPU CryptoHash
This Machine 2267 MHz 83.133
CPU Fibonacci
This Machine 2267 MHz 3.734
CPU N-Queens
This Machine 2267 MHz 10.784
FPU FFT
This Machine 2267 MHz 7.923
FPU Raytracing
This Machine 2267 MHz 18.469

64bit:
CPU Blowfish
This Machine 1600 MHz 8.244
CPU CryptoHash
This Machine 1600 MHz 176.316
CPU Fibonacci
This Machine 1600 MHz 3.302
CPU N-Queens
This Machine 1600 MHz 9.892
FPU FFT
This Machine 1600 MHz 3.668
FPU Raytracing
This Machine 1600 MHz 6.516

So I think this is kinda "RAM usage vs benchmark results" question
Also I noticed that 32bit does not recognize my CPU as dual core (because of 486 kernel I guess...). Does this somehow impact my system performance?

yes, it affects performance, but you can easily install 686-pae kernel wich will recognize both CPU-s. I always choose 64-bit, only somewhat problematic software is flash, but with the latest 11beta , situation is better

sumski wrote:yes, it affects performance, but you can easily install 686-pae kernel wich will recognize both CPU-s.

That sounds like a good idea, but what is the proper way of doing that? I tried it in virtualbox. Simply installed 2.6.39-2-686-pae kernel using this guide, successfully booted into it, but system monitor still shows my cpu as single core.