Please anyone help

[guhanath]

hai all,
I have decided to buy a PC with Athlon 64 bit processor.Now can anyone help with the following points
# Do we need 64 bit OS to run it.
# does all 32 bit applications run on 64 bit processor that include VS.Net 2003,Oracle,SQL Server,Java,PHP
Office applications,Games,Open Source tools
I badly needed a answer
Thanks

[pimpom]

No, you don't need 64-bit OS and other software to use an Athlon 64 system. That's the big advantage AMD has over Intel. An A64 is backwards-compatible with 32-bit software.