W7 32- or 64bit OS?

[Charlie98]

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.

 

[PliotronX]

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.

 

[Charlie98]

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.

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...

 

[Chiefcrowe]

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]

I'd go with 64bit every time

This. I don't think it really needs any additional reasoning provided it can run it.

 

[Charlie98]

This. I don't think it really needs any additional reasoning provided it can run it.

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.

 

[code65536]

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.

 

[sonitravel09]

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

 

[nettrader]

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.

 

[ArisVer]

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.