Bought Win7 64 - Can I install 32?

[Murdoc]

Hey,

I bought win 7 64 through my student account and installed it; it's running fine except the inital bluescreens(they stopped, mysteriously) but the performance is usually crap in games, specifically Valve games (L4D, TF2) I really don't know why, but it never did this in Xp and I'm sure it isn't the OS taking the extra memory(8 gigs)

So someone suggested going to 32 bit, but does that mean I need to buy win 7 again? Or is there a way to install/get 32 bit if i bought the 64 bit version?

Thanks

 

[Nibiru2012]

Did you update all of your drivers? Especially the video card?

Windows 7 installs a lot of drivers on its own, but it is best to use the latest drivers for your motherboard chipsets, video card, etc.

Changing to 32 bit will not give you an advantage, especially since you have 8GB of RAM. The 32 bit Windows 7 will only see less than 4GB of RAM and not utilize the remaining RAM at all.

Did you do an upgrade install? That has been causing a lot of problems for users.

A clean install is the only way to get the best benefits of Windows 7, period! I know its a pain to reinstall all the software but you'll definitely notice a difference.

 

[Murdoc]

Hey thanks for the tips.

It was a full install and I"ve tried tracking down what might be sucking up memory, but nothing seems to be doing it. I've tried turning off every non essential service as well, notta.

Drivers are all up to date, its just weird. I'll blame it on my hardware more then the OS, and just switch over when I get new hardware one day I guess.

I was jsut told the 32bit stuff would probably run better if the 64 bit isn't doing it, since XP ran fine, but who knows. Decided to just go back to xp.

Thanks again.