I have actually found that for old PCs with AGP it actually makes more sense to get a PCI graphics card instead. They are hard to find but they are still making them with GPUs much more modern than you can get with an AGP card. I found a Radeon HD card with drivers for Windows 7 and above for $10 on ebay. Everything I searched for AGP only had XP drivers which does not support Aero in Win7 and doesn't work at all in Win8 and win10.
Thank you all for your replies. I think I'll stick to Win7x64 for now... Can someone confirm that I can't upgrade to Windows 10 32-bit from Windows 7 64-bit directly? Or it's possible? Thanks.
I have a Foxconn Nettop nT-535 NanoPC with an Atom D525 with 4GB and have been trying different options. I had W7 64 and the compatibility checker said that there was no 64 bit W10 display driver so I could not upgrade. I installed W7 32 instead which passed the checks and the upgrade went fine. Just for fun I tried doing a W10 64 clean install and amazingly it found the driver. With testing: W10 32 bit idle uses .7 GB ram and shows 2.99 GB usable. W10 64 idle is at .9 GB but shows 4 GB usable. So far both seem to work the same. Next is to try some benchmarking programs to compare.
32 bit Win10 installed on a 9 year old Athlon64 2.2 GHz pc with 2 Gigs of DDR (2x 1G, the limit on the mobo). It runs fine. Have always heard that the 64 bit operating systems have a larger "footprint", and won't leave as much memory for programs.
Agreed. But as everybody else already said, x86 tends to work best on 2GB. Huh? I see it the exact reverse way, i.e. if you need 64-bit (for whatever reason) then go to x64, else [with 2GB] just stay at x86, it's easier to deal with and the user experience is definitively better.