Installing Win-10 home, 32 vs 64 bit and a few other questions

[Nomen]

I have a Dell E6230 that was bought as a refurbished item and it came with Windows 10 home for refurbished PC's. That's whats on the COA sticker. It was never used or activated. I'm downloading the Windows 10 home ISO's (32 and 64 bit) right now and will find some way to put them on a bootable thumb drive. I'm wondering if the 64 bit is really the way to go. The specs for this laptop are: Dell E6230 4 gb ram (DDR3, 1333 mhz, dual interleave 2 DIMM modules) Intel Core i5-3340 2.7 ghz, 2 cores, HT capable, EM64T I do not have UEFI boot enabled - I would rather not have to unless it's really necessary for Win-10. This laptop will see light use as a browser, email, etc. No games. I'm wondering if 64-bit windows will give better performance vs 32 bit or is there more "overhead" with a 64-bit OS? The Dell chipset drivers for this may very well be 32-bit but somehow dressed up as 64-bit. I see there is a bios update that addresses CVE-2018-3639 & CVE-2018-3640. I have a fuzzy recollection of those vulnerabilites and thought that their mitigation at the bios level came at a CPU performance price. Is that true? Seems that browser updates have also mitigated these vulnerabilities so again is the bios update worth it? And one more thing: Is there anything I can do with the ISO to strip away or remove any telemetry or give the laptop a little (or a lot) less of a connection to the mothership? Is it possible to install and run a win-10 home system without having to set up a microsoft / office account?

[Tripredacus]

32bit vs 64bit is really a matter of preference. And specifically about what kind of programs you are going to want to be running. With Windows 10, there probably isn't going to be any need for running a 16bit program, but there may be a need for a 64bit program. If there is any chance to add more RAM to the system, 64bit would be the way to go.

[halohalo]

You can run 32-bit and 64-bit programs on 64-bit Windows 10, but you will spend more time installing cumulative updates, so you may need a reliable solid state drive.

Microsoft offers Intel microcode updates for Windows 10. However, Intel no longer fixes vulnerabilities for your CPU. If you can uninstall the microcode updates offered by Microsoft, you will find your answer to the performance problem. If you think the performance hit is not acceptable, you can install the firmware update for Intel ME without applying the BIOS update.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/protect-your-windows-devices-against-speculative-execution-side-channel-attacks-a0b9f66c-f426-d854-fdbb-0e6beaeeee87

https://software.intel.com/security-software-guidance/processors-affected-transient-execution-attack-mitigation-product-cpu-model

[Sergiaws]

The thin is that Windows 10 X64 and 4gb of ram don't have good performance, so I think you can consider a 32 bits version of Windows 10 with PAE enabled or upgrade your ram if you think that you need Windows 10 x64. You can also consider a LTSC version of Windows 10.

[erpdude8]

according to this specs sheet from Dell, the Dell Latitude E6230 laptop can support up to 16 gigs of RAM (2x8Gb) - that's what this Crucial site says.
install a pair of 8Gb RAM chips before attempting to install & run a Win10 X64 OS