[Ham-Computers] 64 bit v 32 bit question(s)

[Gene, WØQFC]

Greetings:

I have a HP P6318F computer that is a 64 bit machine that I bought because I thought that a 64 bit machine would be much better than my older 32 bit machines. 

It has a AMD Athlon ll x4 630 processor @ 2.8 GHz.

It has 8 GB Ram.

It came with Windows 7 pre-installed and after using Win 7 for a few weeks I decided that it was not the OP system for me, so I bought XP PRO x64 software and thought that I would be in hog heaven with a faster machine with 8 GB ram!

WRONG.

I found that a lot of my 'fav' software would not work on a 64 bit machine and  
overall, it is much slower that my older HP machine that is 1.79 GHz with 4 GB RAM.

So, the BIG questions are:

1.      Would I be better off dumping the XP 64 bit and use the 32 bit XP?

2.      Would I degrade performance because XP 32 bit will only see 4 GB RAM?

3.      What would YOU do in this situation?

I would appreciate you collective opinion with the above. . . . 

TIA

Gene, WØQFC