Upgrading old laptop

[joddle]

A relative has asked me to upgrade her aging laptop (Acer Travelmate 5720) because she is getting messages about Vista not being supported soon. I have said I would upgrade to W7 in order then to qualify for a later W10 free upgrade - as I already have a couple of spare W7pro licences and both 32 and 64 bit install disks

She does not have anything important on the laptop as her files have been backed up to another HDD. So my question is which way to do the upgrade.

a) let the system upgrade
b) to a clean install

To my mind once she has W7 installed, the reserved reinstall partition that came with the machine will be simply unused and so that space will all be wasted - so perhaps best to reformat the HDD and do clean re-install.

What do others think?

Then there is the issue 32 or 64 bit - the pc has 1 GB installed and a max memory capability of 8GB ram (DDR2-667/PC2-5300) which is cheap enough to buy and the spec seems to suggest it is 64 bit capable.


Again any thoughts?

 

[Starbuck]

Hi joddle,

she is getting messages about Vista not being supported soon.

Mainsteam support has already finished ( 10 April 2012 )
Extended support will finish on ( 11 April 2017 )

I have said I would upgrade to W7 in order then to qualify for a later W10 free upgrade

Sounds a good plan.

She does not have anything important on the laptop as her files have been backed up to another HDD.

In that case a clean install sounds a good option.

Then there is the issue 32 or 64 bit - the pc has 1 GB installed and a max memory capability of 8GB ram

Even with 1gb you may well struggle to get Win7 32bit to run nicely.
I know that M$ say that 1GB of ram is recommended for the 32bit OS..... but I'd double that to make sure.
It's always worth doubling any M$ say as far as ram goes.
So for the 32bit, I'd recommend 2GB ..... for the 64bit I'd recommend 4GB. ( you could even go up to the 8GB max with the 64bit)
If adding ram isn't a problem and you have both OS, you may as well add the 64bit OS.
If you are thinking of getting the upgrade to Win10 later...... if you have the 64bit OS, you'll really need 4GB for Win10 minimum.
Something to bare in mind.

 

[KenB]

Hi,

Before you upgrade to Win-7 you may wish to run this advisory tool
click here

It will analyse the system and let you know if there are any possible conflicts.