Windows 7 - 32 or 64 bit ?

Just bite the bullet and buy a new PC! It's not worth the hassle - have you thought about driver compatibility for external devices??

[Mr K]

Originally Posted by LSainsbury

Just bite the bullet and buy a new PC! It's not worth the hassle - have you thought about driver compatibility for external devices??

That's all very well for you to say Lord Sainsbury but you have loads of money

Let me see a new pc for £350, or a windows 7 oem DVD for £49 on a pc that is fine....

Drivers - the windows upgrade checker should have checked that - as i'm going form 32 bit to 32 bit hopefully there shouldn't be many problems, but will doubtless be something.

Very sad to lose XP - it boots faster to the desktop than any other pc I've tried that runs windows 7, vista or 8, all of those machines have more memory too...

Originally Posted by Mr K

That's all very well for you to say Lord Sainsbury but you have loads of money

Let me see a new pc for £350, or a windows 7 oem DVD for £49 on a pc that is fine....

Drivers - the windows upgrade checker should have checked that - as i'm going form 32 bit to 32 bit hopefully there shouldn't be many problems, but will doubtless be something.

Very sad to lose XP - it boots faster to the desktop than any other pc I've tried that runs windows 7, vista or 8, all of those machines have more memory too...

Lord Sainsbury - lol!!

How about a Intel Core i3-3240 Processor (3.4 GHz, 3 MB cache)
4 GB DDR3 RAM, 500GB HDD and you supply the OS for £273?

[Kabaal]

Originally Posted by Mr K

Very sad to lose XP - it boots faster to the desktop than any other pc I've tried that runs windows 7, vista or 8, all of those machines have more memory too...

Add an SSD for 50 quid and you'll never need to worry about boot times again. That is assuming the system has SATA ports and not just IDE.

---------- Post added at 21:33 ---------- Previous post was at 21:29 ----------

Originally Posted by tizmeinnit

but not on the brain lol

Indeed, it's been mind humping me all month with an Ubuntu server version.

[Matth]

For some old devices (like my scanner) there are 32 bit Windows 7 drivers available but not 64 bit.

One other issue with 32 / 64, other than physical RAM support, is virtual space. Some things suffer from the 2GB private / 2GB system virtual split, and large address aware 32 bit software can use a full 4GB private virtual space while running on 64 bit Windows - in 32 bit, you can shift the boundaries (a bit like the old /3GB switch), but there are limits to how far you can slice down the system space.

The virtual space limit can hit system running as low as 2GB physical RAM - maybe less, but the performance would be dragging due to excessive swapping before the limit hit.

[cookie_365]

If you don't need any windows specific apps on it, just install ubuntu

[Sirius]

Originally Posted by tizmeinnit

but not on the brain lol

I find linux no more difficult than widows now i have used it for a while on my server.

[idi banashapan]

Originally Posted by cookie_365

If you don't need any windows specific apps on it, just install ubuntu

I'm not keen on the way Ubuntu has gone over the last few years with side-bars and stuff. have you tried Linux Mint? feels much cleaner in my opinion.

[Pauls9]

In case anyone's interested:

I've just completed an evaluation installation of Win 8 (let's not get into a Win 7/8 argument ) on a 2006 Dell GX620 with 2GB of RAM, formerly running 32 bit Win XP SP3. Took a while to work out whether the machine had 64 bit hardware - it did. The sticker on the box said it had a Pentium D CPU, but the boot screen and diagnostics said the CPU was a Pentium 4 - turned out not to be an issue. The Win 8 upgrade advisor wouldn't run, but the Win 7 advisor said the machine was OK for both 32 and 64 bit.

The biggest problem for me was that the evaluation was a complete fresh install with no further upgrade possible and the cheapest non-OEM Win 8 Pro software was an upgrade, so I needed a (free) way to get back to XP. In the end I found AOMEI backupper, which created a full backup on an external USB disk drive and a boot/restore CD. Most other programs wanted to charge for this functionality.

I went for the 32 bit version of Win 8, partly to conserve RAM and partly guessing that 32 bit drivers for old devices would be more readily available. Much to my surprise, in the end everything worked perfectly (sometimes only after several reboots). The Win 8 Skype didn't recognise the Microsoft USB web cam, so I followed advice and installed the desktop version, which cured the problem (and I much prefer the desktop programs to the Metro ones, anyway!)

The Win 8 upgrade disks (both 32 bit and 64 bit) are now on their way. So a Win 8 PC for £65.

To add to the paranoia over keeping XP: One comment I've seen talks about the black hat crowd looking at the next set of patches for other versions of Windows to find vulnerabilities that also exist in XP, then exploiting them. I know a good AV and firewall and keeping away from dodgy web sites are always good ideas, but if I can avoid the worry and have some techie fun for very little money, then I'm happy.

[tweetiepooh]

If you really need Windows then you also need to weigh up if all new versions of software are available in 32 bit. One of our vendors now only has 64 bit in Windows and is looking that way in other O/S's too.

I'd also speak up for Linux if you don't need Windows tools and most people don't. Personally I use OpenSuse but use Mint on some old second hand laptops for the family and that works fine too. You can try Linux as live versions, booting from CD/DVD without installing to see if you like/can use them.

[mark1234]

Originally Posted by heero_yuy

If I were the OP I wouldn't rush to upset a well running PC. XP support may be disappearing soon but that does not make the OS suddenly obsolete or more vulnerable than now. IMO hackers will be attacking current Windows platforms rather than legacy systems.

Problem with that line of thinking is that XP is still used on over 20% of PCs. It is also no where near as secure by default as Vista, 7, 8, Linux or OSX. So, it is very likely to continue to be ripped apart by hackers who will now be safe in the knowledge that MS will have abandoned it.

You will also have to consider that with vendor support ending, 3rd parties are also likely to stop updating their software on XP. I don't know what the support policies of Flash or Java are, but they're the biggest source of exploits at the moment, and if they stop providing XP compatible versions then you'd be stuck with even more old software that will have known security holes.

Having said all that, simply not running as an administrator account will prevent almost all hacks from being exploited.

[truthspeaker]

memory RAM is cheap nowadays.

[fatmat8]

most definitley 64 it's the way to go

Originally Posted by fatmat8

most definitley 64 it's the way to go

not when the OS will use a good portion of the available ram leading to more paging


People saying run 64 bit Win 7 with 2.5 gig of ram are the sort of person run Vista on 1 gig and then said it was slow

[Mr K]

Five updates to Win XP last night (the last ?) Somebody, somewhere still cares for it....

I might just keep it anyway and disconnect it from the InterWeb, which is much overated If you've got Solitaire and minesweeper what else do you need ?