Question about 32bit

[mknabster]

My grandfather showed me his new Dell Inspiron desktop he got 2 weeks ago today, and i was checking it out to see how everything was running, and i noticed that it had Vista Home Basic 32bit. I looked as his RAM, and it says he has 4GBs. Now shouldn't Dell have sold him the 64bit of the software? I went into dxdiag, and it says there was 3316MBs of RAM installed, while my computer said there was 4GBs in there. I have Vista Ultimate 64bit for my computer, would it be worth it for him if i installed that on his machine so he can take advantage of the extra RAM he has? And also, could i do an upgrade from Home basic 32 to ultimate 64 as well?

[shadowpr]

No, you can't upgrade from 32 bit to 64. It would have to be a fresh install.

I would suggest leaving it with a 32bit os.

[mknabster]

Originally Posted by shadowpr No, you can't upgrade from 32 bit to 64. It would have to be a fresh install. I would suggest leaving it with a 32bit os.

Ah that stinks, i hate to see him waste money like that and not be able to use all that he paid for. But, he mainly just uses it for checking email and surfing the net, so i guess the scheme of things, he's fine.

[shadowpr]

It's not really a waste. Windows will still use as much as it can.

We usually recommend 4gb with all new builds, even when they will use 32 bit os's.

And if that's all he does, then you're right, he won't really notice a difference.

[mknabster]

Originally Posted by shadowpr It's not really a waste. Windows will still use as much as it can. We usually recommend 4gb with all new builds, even when they will use 32 bit os's. And if that's all he does, then you're right, he won't really notice a difference.

Huh, that's interesting. Now if only XP could recognize all 4GBs of RAM i hvae installed...

[Alaron]

It will if you upgrade to XP 64bit, but I wouldn't recommend that. It was never well-supported.

[mknabster]

Originally Posted by Alaron It will if you upgrade to XP 64bit, but I wouldn't recommend that. It was never well-supported.

Yea i heard a lot of bad things about XP 64, but my computer doesn't have drivers to support that anyways, so it's not going to happen.