Windows 7: Will my 32 bit legacy program benefit from a cpu upgrade?

I'm running a 32 bit windows point of sale application in one of the family run business stores. The PC has a athlon xp 2000+ and 128MB RAM and has WinXP as the OS. The program developer in his latest requirements says a pentium class 1.5ghz processor is a minimum with 1.5GB RAM. I want to know if it is worth the upgrade to an i3 with 4 or 8 GB of memory and Win 7. Is there a way I can measure the increase? The program has a foxpro database as the backend.



Thanks!

As far as I'm aware you may have difficulties in running Foxpro on Windows 7 but I stand to be corrected by those more experienced on the issue.

You're already running a fairly low spec PC so the suggestions being made by your developer are sound. Be aware though that 32bit OS can only see 3.2GB of RAM. You need to go to a 64bit OS to be able to access more than that. Whilst memory (DDR3) is fairly cheap atm, unless you are running memory intensive programs (Photoshop, etc) then the benefits of going above 4GB of memory are marginal in my experience

Some programs written with FoxPro work on Windows 7, and some don't - also, you generally have far better luck with 32bit Windows 7 than you do with 64bit Windows 7 and FoxPro, for what it's worth. However, it's a real crapshoot, and upgrading the OS from XP (if the app is that old) probably isn't worth it. It might make sense to pick up a new machine with a decent CPU, but 4GB of RAM and a 32bit OS (XP or otherwise) will probably be the best bet for FoxPro compatibility.