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Moving from Win 7 Home Premium 32 bit to 64 bit
I have a 2.5 year old Acer Laptop which was a top spec beast at the time, here are the main specs:
Screen: 18.4"
Processor: Intel Core 2 P8600 @ 2.4 Ghz
RAM: 4Gb (3 used)
Twin 300 Gb HDDs
O/S: Win 7 Home Premium with SP 1, but only 32 BIT! I wish I had understood the implications of that when I bought it.
FULL SYSTEM SPECS ARE IN MY sevenforums.com Control Panel.
I use this computer for multi-tasking and these days often have 8-10 programs open simultaneously. I do no gaming at all. I am using Office and a range of graphics programs, plus browsing and email. It is performing very slowly now and I wanted to speed up everything. I know the real answer is a new laptop with a core i7 processor and matching components, but that is not within my budget. I must have a laptop as I travel quite a bit, so a desktop machine is not an option. The 18.4" screen is a dream to use but the list of available machines is very small. I live in the Philippines, so Acer was definitely my first choice as there are service centres in most major cities.
When I look in Device Manager I see that the processor is labelled "ACPI x86-based PC". Yet when I check on the Intel site at Intel® Core I see that this processor is capable of running 64 bit progs. So if I installed a 64 bit version of Win 7 would that device manager setting change to 64 bit? I have downloaded the X17-24209.iso file which is the official 64 bit version of Home Premium. I have done nothing with that yet. I am hoping that I can over-write my existing Win 7 system with that and use the same serial number as the 32 bit boxed version I have. I am guessing again that I would use the clean install process described in Clean Install Windows 7 ?
Anyway, I ran the Microsoft Win 7 upgrade advisor - and on the 64 bit tab it reported "You'll need to perform a custom install of 64-bit Win 7 and then reinstall your programs." So that seems a positive thing. I have only my OS and apps on partition C:, all data and backups are on other partitions, so formatting C: and installing the 64 bit version I have downloaded seems the best option, that would allow me to use all 4Mb of RAM. I am tempted to do a test drive and install the 64 bit version over the top of the existing one, just to see it all works OK. Would that be advisable?
Looks to me that a processor upgrade to at least i5, would be another big boost, but I am undecided about spending several hundred dollars on one of those.
I would be grateful for some feedback on the above, before I start doing something and **** it all up well and truly! I do take regular image files of the C: partition, so have a way back from a disaster if necessary.
Cheers
Adrian