Changing Win XP to 7

[Fenikss74]

Currently I'm running windows XP professional, but it seems that there is the time to change it to 7 home or ultimate.

My main question- How will it affect my pc specs?
I have (from system information):
*Nvidia 9500GT graphics card. (1GB)
*Intel Core 2 DUO CPU E8400. (3,00 and 3,00 GHz)
*3GB RAM
*Windows XP professional SP3
*500GB and 1TB hard disks.

Also, what is the main difference between 32 and 64 bit versions? And what would you suggest for gaming and 3D gaming, movies, ect.?

I am not expert in PC upgrading, so I'm asking.

Regards,
Ralph

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Ralph, aka Fenikss
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[Akura]

On a computer like yours, go for 32 bit Windows 7.


Backup your stuff and boot from disk.


Voila




I have 32 bit, works a charm.

[Fenikss74]

Yes, but how exatly is the 32 bit version working compearing to the 64? I know that if you are using 64 bit version, some 32 bit applications can be slower, so what happens, if I use 64 bit apps on 32? Also, I want to know about that 3D thingie.

EDIT: Also I might upgrade my RAM to 4gb.

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Ralph, aka Fenikss
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[Fletcher]

Just do what I did, make a new partition and install. Best of both worlds then.

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"Oh chuffing blimey, another day, another person being whiney!"
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[11of10]

Do what the Fletcher said, it's a good suggestion, as you might just not like Windows 7.

Other than that, 32 bit systems are the old stuff, 64 bit is the new (and improved). So, if you install 64bit Operating System, you should have better performance than on poor old WinXP.

I had Win7 on a much older computer than yours (1 GB RAM 32Bit CPU@1833MHz) and it actually worked quite ok.

I haven't really removed it as much as my motherboard died. I'll soon be buying something like yours, and will be going with Win7 most probably.

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[Raiyushi]

The difference between 64-bit and 32-bit is amount of data they can address at once...

64-bit operating systems can address 64-bits worth of data.
32-bit operating systems can address 32-bits worth of data.

What's this mean?
32-bits of Data can only address 32-bits of data at once which is about 4GB.
However, due to overhead you can expect to address about 3.3GB. So if you have MORE than say...3.3GB of memory you'd want to go for a 64-bit operating system, but if you have LESS than that amount it really doesn't matter.

Some applications are designed to run in 64-bit operating systems, meaning they're designed to be able to use more than 4GB of memory. This is usually not the case with almost all applications, and most applications that are 64-bit will run just fine even if you're not running a 64-bit operating system. The only applications I can think of that would use more than 4GB of memory would be something like a really badass photoshop, or Autocad/3D Design applications/etc.

Also, you CANNOT upgrade from XP -> 7. It has to be Vista -> 7 so you will HAVE to make a backup of what you want to keep.

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[sean24]

So your basicly saying that 32 bit OS's cant adress large amounts of RAM, about over 4 GB.

Im thinking of doing a similar sort of thing actually. I have XP Profesh.

4GB RAM
AMD Phenom 9750 Quad Core Processor 2.40 GHz a core.
NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT 512 MB video card.

Should I upgrade? I will probably get the 64-bit OS because im thinking of upgrading my RAM.

Also, doesnt' the 16, 32, 64 bit change the color quality? Right click the desktop, propities, it says color quility (32 bit) on mine.

[kuth]

64bit is the future.

That said, I have 32bit XP Home on one partition and 64bit 7 Home P on the other. I have a hardware issue I haven't resolved (Not MS fault, you can't honestly expect them to test their OS on EVERY software setup can you?) so I use XP for now. I have 7 on my work laptop and I love it.

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[Raiyushi]

So your basicly saying that 32 bit OS's cant adress large amounts of RAM, about over 4 GB.

Im thinking of doing a similar sort of thing actually. I have XP Profesh.

4GB RAM
AMD Phenom 9750 Quad Core Processor 2.40 GHz a core.
NVIDIA GeForce 9800 GT 512 MB video card.

Should I upgrade? I will probably get the 64-bit OS because im thinking of upgrading my RAM.

Also, doesnt' the 16, 32, 64 bit change the color quality? Right click the desktop, propities, it says color quility (32 bit) on mine.

Yeah. 16-bit is 65536. Which means you can display 65,536 colours because it's 16-bits. 32-bits is quite a bit more. However, you can never truly find TRUE 32-bit...Most you'll probably get is 24-bit (16777216) or so. However, most of these colours are achieved via Dithering anyways so if you sometimes notice that if you go 16-bit and the colours are off, but the image is crisp, then going 24-bit or 32-bit causes the image to go off a bit and the colours are better but seem washed out... It's because your monitor is dithering (Mixing 2 colours to make 1 colour)

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[Fletcher]

64 bit OS is more powerful than its 32bit counterpart and in THEORY its almost, but not quite double the performance of the 32 bit system. 64 bit does make better use of its resources if given enough for the OS to manage with.

64 bit processors with 2+ Gb minimum I would suggest, but for now, not too many programs make full use of a 64 bit processor. Yet. It is the future, but will developers use it?

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