<div class="gmail_quote">2011/4/2 Paul Lemmons <<a href="mailto:paul@lemmons.name">paul@lemmons.name</a>> <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;"> When Natty comes out I am planning on doing a clean install. My first on this particular machine since Feisty. I am considering the 64 bit version. The machine has more than 4GB of ram so I have been successfully running the pae version without any real hiccups. It has been a long time since I considered "real" 64 bit and was wondering has it matured to the point where it is as smooth, application and stability wise, as the 32 bit version? In particular: Firefox? Flash? Java? VMWare Workstation? </blockquote></div> I consider the 64 bit version quite stable. About the specific applications you mentioned: Firefox - as stable as its plugins allow it to be. If a plugin crashes, all browser windows crash, but it's the same in the 32 bit version (at least for now. Firefox 4 is supposed to change this, but I didn't test it yet). Flash - unstable. But the 32 bit version is not very stable either. Java - very stable VMWare Workstation - I don't use it, but I use Virtualbox and it is very stable. In my opinion, flash is the most unstable software among those I use in the 64 bit version. And, because of it, Firefox may become unstable too. However, without flash installed, Firefox is reasonably stable. All other applications I use are very stable in the 64 bit version. []'s Marcelo