Win 7 Pro vs XP Pro

[Jim Hawkins]

What do you gain by upgrading from XP Pro to Win 7 Pro ? And what do you lose ?

Jim Hawkins

[Clive George]

Support/patches.

64 bit if you're sensible and hence ability to use more than 3G memory. Task manager is better. It's more stable IME.

Money if the upgrade costs? UAC can be a bit of a pain if you set it up wrong.

[Adrian]

Right now, this is the big one.

XP won't support any version of IE above IE8, and - of course - even if you use a different browser, Windows can't have IE removed. They're very soon stopping all security patches for XP, although IE8 might continue until W7's support ends. It wouldn't surprise me AT ALL if there's a big security hole that'll never be patched heading to XP very shortly.

[John Rumm]

Support, better security, compatibility with modern applications... Win 7 64 bit is useful, XP 64 bit lacked driver support. Start button search is quite handy.

Support for older hardware and applications (although you may be able to use them with an XP virtual machine)

Slight learning curve getting used to changes.

[polygonum]

W7 does not come from the land of the Teletubbies.

[Jim Hawkins]

What's UAC ?

[Mr Pounder]

IMO it's all a load of M$ bollocks. I ran Win'98 for years without one single patch or update and was not hacked etc. I have loads of M$ updates waiting for this XP machine,hey look,I'm still here. I will stick with XP until this pushing 7 year old computer pops it's clogs. I don't play games etc and use AVG, Spybot, Superantispyware, Malwarebytes and CrapCleaner. But, each to their own.

[Clive George]

My XP didn't either though. The UI on my Win7 boxes looks very similar to my XP one...

[John Williamson]

If you've not met it, be glad. User Access Control, first introduced under Vista, but mostly tamed under 7. The most obvious thing it does is every time you want to install or update a program, it blacks out the desktop and puts up a window saying, basically, "Are you *really, really* sure you want to do this?", and may ask you to enter the password for administrator permissions, which may be, and probably is on most systems, blank.

[John Rumm]

A widget that traps any attempt by an application to make a change that requires privilege, and if permitted, grant it temporarily.

Later versions of windows moved away from the admin privileges by default security model to one that can gain them only when required.

You can knobble it under Win 7 if you want.

[Adrian]

Crucial will tell you exactly what the score is.

But I rather suspect the issue is that it's virtualised, and your host's plain running out of welly, rather than memory.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Unlikely.

since CPU is time sliced by vbx and will be allowed as much CPU as it needs

I have never net a machine that didn't have the ability to have RAM in even Gbyte increments so Id guess 4GB is possible

[F]

Turn it off. It's easy to do.

[John Rumm]

You can usually stick in 4GB, but 32 bit windows can't make use of all of it.

[soup]

Only if his O/S can handle all those memory addresses, 64 bit windows can but 32 bit windows can't[1]. How many addresses can his O/S handle?

Incidentally isn't the amount of RAM accessible limited to 3.125GB in the BIOS of the 530

[1] Theoretically it can but there are lots of reports about 32 bit Windows only "seeing" 3.5 GB. Quite often this 'lost' memory has been reserved for on-board video but with the Inspiron having a separate graphic card all bets are off.

[Jim Hawkins]

Is it possible to upgrade a 32bit machine (whatever the OS) to its 64 bit equivalent - or do you have to buy new ?

[John Rumm]

If the hardware is already 64 bit, then yes you can just upgrade OS. If the hardware is 32 only, then you will need new mobo, cpu and ram probably.

[polygonum]

On 32-bit W7, look at:

Control Panel\All Control Panel Items\System

It will tell you how much is usable. I see quite a lot of HP boxes at

3.24 GB - but it varies.

[Ian Jackson]

This might be useful. I've got it on two XP PCs, but I can't remember if I put it on a W7 Pro laptop.

[soup]

Thanks for that however I don't have an Inspiron 530 to hand it was Huge that was asking about RAM for that. And I am sure he doesn't run Windows at all.

Although replying to TNP I was (sort of) 'talking' about Huge's system