Upgrading??

tronator

Chrishazle wrote: »

I'd think twice about 64 bit. I've upgraded the RAM in my wife's laptop to 4Gb - it's fun accessing the 2 places where the rAM is installed, but I found a Youtube video "how to" which really helped. 32 bit means all your peripherals still work - I have 64 bit W7 on my desktop and had some fun with drivers initially, and have a Toshiba 1Tb USB hard drive (bought last August!) that works on the laptop but not on my desktop!

Certainly has nothing to do with 32 vs. 64 bit...

fenlander_uk

I've recently migrated both my old Vista machines to Linux Mint Mate 17.3 64-bit. One is a 10-year old Toshiba laptop, the other a 7-year old Sony Vaio media centre.

I had a few puzzles on the way (all resolvable with a little help from the web), but nothing like the problems I had with the Toshiba when it was new with an early release of Vista installed. Now both machines do all I ask of them, connect properly to all my peripherals, including nVidia graphics cards, scanners, printers and network drives. They start up and close down in a small fraction of the time they took under Vista. They mostly run the same or similar software to Windows: in some cases it is a little better, in others Windows has the edge. I am actually chuffed to bits with the result.

I have a Windows 7 i5 laptop with an SSD, but using it is in no way a better experience than using either of the old - and much less well specified - linux machines.

If you're up for a challenge, give it a try. I'd get a spare hard disk - a 320GB disk can be had for under £20 new at Amazon - pop it in the computer and have a go. If you get stuck or don't like the result, just reinstall your Vista drive. Less hassle than dual-booting and less worrying than committing straight away to a different OS. And a spare drive costs less than a legit copy of W7. Remember, too, that as soon as you install W7, you'll have to start working out how to prevent it updating to W10.