Do I or don't I

[Joddle]

I have a small setup at home which is also used as a classsroom for my wife's language school. At the moment we have 3 Dell 755s and 3 Dell d400 laptops all running XP pro. All the PCs are in a work group and all works pretty well. Also we have a laptop running Vista which occasionally connects to the workgroup.

The main software is prettey standard - MS office, Photoshop7 and on one machine Adobe Professional 8. - I don't intend spending a load on replacement software.

However I know I will not get support for XP for much longer and the 3 755s are not using all their available memory and so it seems time for a change and I am considering of installing windows7 on at least the three 755 machines.

Now for the queations.
Should I use 64 or 32 bit versions of W7 on the 755s (they are all 64bit capable).?
Is it worth installing 32 bit W7 on the three laptops or shodl I stick with XP?
If I used a mixture of W7 32 and 62 bit can these work on a common workgroup as in XP?
If I kept XP on the laptops can I have a workgroup or similar using the W7 machines?

In other words what would my best options be? I am not thinking of upgrading the laptops at the moment as they are more than capable for what they are being used for although if any break down then I would of course get a much more modern machine as a replacement.

You expert advice much appreciated with any infor on drawbacks or plusses for any solution.

 

[TrainableMan]

Only a few reasons not to use 64-bit: if you have less than 2GB of RAM, if you run very old 16-bit software (16-bit cannot run natively in a 64-bit environment), or because you have hardware you are not willing to replace and does not offer 64-bit drivers.

What you should do is download the Windows Upgrade Advisor and turn on everything (printers, scanners, biometric scanners, external hard drives, etc) and run the advisor on each machine. It will tell you if the machine is 64-bit capable and what software/hardware that may have issues.

The advisor software is good but it doesn't know everything, so if there is specific software you are concerned about then use the compatibility center to look-up your concerns.

Now specifics for the products you mentioned ...

The 755s's only come with 2GB of memory, that is the recommended bare minimum for 64bit so I think you might actually do a little better with 32-bit (it has a little less overhead) and you are less likely to run into driver or software issues. That's just my opinion. Also Dell stopped supporting the 755 with Vista so they only offer 32 and 64-bit drivers for Vista which is what you would have to use for anything not found automatically by W7.

The D400s are even older and Dell offered no support past Windows 2000 so you may not be able to get them working (ie not find working drivers) at all with W7. So you could make a back-up image of the computer to an external drive or elsewhere on your network, then try an upgrade; that way if, like I fear, it doesn't work, you can always restore it to XP.

 

[Joddle]

Many thanks for the info - very useful.

Re the notes above - In fact my 755s all have 4gb of memory although I can only "see" about 3.25 which I am told is normal when using a 32bit OS. The D400s were all supplied from new with XP Pro and have XP pro certs in the bios.

Also from browsing the web I have now established that the 755s can run W7 and several sites have details on how to do this so that part at least is pretty straightforward - as for the D400s, again from looking on the web I note that this has been done OK as well so maybe I will atttempt this. SOme reports say even runing with only 512MB of Ram the D400s run better under W7 than under XP !! and I have 2GB on each D400!! It seems I will be able to have 3 Dell755s all running the full 4GB of memory in W7 64 bit and the D400s running on VIsta or W7 32 bit. The future now does not look so bleak or as expensive as I had feared!!

 

[TrainableMan]

Re the notes above - In fact my 755s all have 4gb of memory although I can only "see" about 3.25 which I am told is normal when using a 32bit OS. The D400s were all supplied from new with XP Pro and have XP pro certs in the bios.

If they have 4GB that is very good for 64-bit and in fact you need to use 64-bit to take advantage of the last 0.7 GB so I would definitely recommend using 64-bit if the other two reasons (16-bit software, unavailable 64-bit drivers for any hardware you can't replace) aren't an issue. So I would still run the advisor but 64-bit is sounding much more promising and even advantageous.

as for the D400s, again from looking on the web I note that this has been done OK as well so maybe I will atttempt this. SOme reports say even runing with only 512MB of Ram the D400s run better under W7 than under XP !! and I have 2GB on each D400!! It seems I will be able to have 3 Dell755s all running the full 4GB of memory in W7 64 bit and the D400s running on VIsta or W7 32 bit. The future now does not look so bleak or as expensive as I had feared!!

W7 32bit's minimum "recommended" RAM is 1GB so the 512MB is pushing it but it definitely has been done, but your 2GB means THAT part won't be an issue. Almost any device that can run Vista will also work in W7 because they are so similar, my concern was that the D400s weren't even supported through Vista so you could have issues finding drivers but, based on what you found, it does sound like W7 32-bit is worth trying.

Best of luck. And if you have an opportunity, maybe report back here to pass on your progress and hopeful success to others in a similar situation who might find this thread in their search for answers.

 

[Joddle]

So I would still run the advisor but 64-bit is sounding much more promising and even advantageous. .

Yes agreed - and I have as advised run the advisor which only rpeorts one issue I may have - and that is with some old SW which I don't really use any more and certainly could easily replace.

I will report back one I have attempted the move - but that could be a little while yet as XP is still serving me well and I really believe in "If it aint broke don't fix it"