Win10 x86 or Win7 x64 on older hardware?

Discussion in 'Windows 10' started by maya77, Jul 29, 2015.

  1. shawnmos

    shawnmos MDL Member

    Oct 27, 2007
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    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.
     
  2. maya77

    maya77 MDL Member

    Aug 30, 2009
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    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.
     
  3. Psebcool

    Psebcool MDL Novice

    Jul 30, 2015
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    No, it's not possible.

    You must reinstall W7 in x86 version to be able upgrade to W10 x86 as I did.
     
  4. AStuff

    AStuff MDL Novice

    Dec 28, 2009
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    #24 AStuff, Aug 8, 2015
    Last edited: Aug 9, 2015
    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.
     
  5. darkodar

    darkodar MDL Addicted

    Feb 12, 2013
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    x64 work great on 2GB or 3GB ram , no need for x86(32bit).
     
  6. Slamtilt

    Slamtilt MDL Novice

    Jul 10, 2014
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    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.
     
  7. 10aout

    10aout MDL Novice

    Aug 8, 2015
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    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.