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W7 32- or 64bit OS?

Charlie98

Charlie98

Diamond Member
I test drove Windows 7 on my daughter's old Dell laptop, I was surprised it loaded and is working OK from what I have seen. I used my 64-bit install disk. I'll be buying a key this week to permanently load W7 on it and I'm wondering if I should get a 32bit OS as opposed to the 64. I don't really know what the difference is...

It's a 2007 Dell Inspiron 1501 with AMD Turion 64x2 (TL-64) chip, originally with XP, although Vista was available at the time.
 
Generally if the system has less than 4GB of RAM, go with 32-bit unless you plan on adding more RAM to equal or exceed 4GB. Since it's already installed and working fine, it's not worth the time to reload 32-bit.
 
PliotronX said:
Generally if the system has less than 4GB of RAM, go with 32-bit unless you plan on adding more RAM to equal or exceed 4GB. Since it's already installed and working fine, it's not worth the time to reload 32-bit.
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I'm still debating adding 4GB RAM... I'll have to buy a full set, I've already got 2x1GB cards of DDR2 in it now.

It definitely taps the RAM, that's for sure...
 
I'd go with 64bit every time, just in case you decide to upgrade the RAM or clone it to a different machine with more memory. As it is, I've noticed that 2 GB of RAM is a bit slow these days, and I always will go with 4 GB RAM as a minimum for anything.
 
TheRyuu said:
This. I don't think it really needs any additional reasoning provided it can run it.
Click to expand...

It has so far... which really surprised me. I just never expected this thing to be able to run W7 reasonably, let alone 64-bit. I've not really went digging for drivers (ODD, mouse/touchpad, etc) but it's working without them at the moment.
 
That's the same model of laptop that my aunt had. I put 7-x64 on some years ago, shortly after 7 had RTM'ed, to replace their decrepit and compromised XP install. It only had 2GB of RAM, but their usage was light--just web browsing and Office, mostly--and I prefer to have consistent platforms for the systems that I support (at the time, I was standardizing the systems that I support to 7-x64).

It worked pretty well until it succumbed to hardware failure a year ago. It even ran Windows 8 x64 pretty well, too.
 
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I have been using Windows Vista 32 bit & 64 bit and Windows 7 64 bit, I have never had any kind of problems using 64 bit system, except once and that was my own fault
 
Win 7 64bit can run with 2GB for the minimum requirements but using 4 will run better. More than 4GB is a very good solution. When i had 2GB i used Win 7 32bit.
 
I have used W7 64bit with only 2GB RAM for 6 months and never runned into any kind of problems. I think the drawback is about 250 MB RAM.
 
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