Thinkpads Forum

Will a VISTA Business 64-bit restore/recovery run and activate on a machine delivered with 32-bit originally?
The machine is a 2768-GM1

Yes - if you have the disks, you can use it (or if you get the oem certificate and the key off the 32-bit install, you can run it) - the key on the bottom is for the version of windows - not the archetecture - you can run anything with the name in it.

Thank you!

Brother you might as well go W7 64 bit. Vista in either 32 or 64 flava is a resource hog. Reminds me of WindowsME.

Bánh mì wrote:Brother you might as well go W7 64 bit. Vista in either 32 or 64 flava is a resource hog. Reminds me of WindowsME.

Vista with SP2 runs very well, almost as fast as 7 and XP.

As pianowizard said, vista sp2 runs (in my experience), even better on some systems than windows 7 - there was a thread about that a while ago. IMHO, unless you need windows 7 for something specific, its not worth the money. (YMMV, this is my personal experience)

i d like to see that thread you mention -
i ve used vista home 32 that was pretty fine - but that business 64 with 4G ram goes to 48% just after booting and that prefetch keeps the hdd running like 8 minutes after booting - i d really like to believe vista being as good as 7

deickos wrote:i d like to see that thread you mention -
i ve used vista home 32 that was pretty fine - but that business 64 with 4G ram goes to 48% just after booting and that prefetch keeps the hdd running like 8 minutes after booting

That thread was just like this thread, i.e. several people claimed that Vista was horrible and then craigmontHunter, dr_st and I disagreed. So, nothing new there LOL!

I will upgrade my Dell Precision 390 from 32bit Vista Business to 64bit in a few days and will report whether it runs as well as 32bit. Is your 64bit Vista SP2?

I am running Business 64-bit, and while it idles at 50% ram useage, I have never seen it go over 70% total - I always have over a gb of ram free.I noticed the same thing when I went from 1gb - 3gb to 4gb - half the ram is used at idle, but it never fills it up. As was mentioned in several vista reviews when it first came out, I would prefer that my ram is being used for prefetch/superfetch (whichever it is), rather than sitting empty i.e. xp - it had very low memory use when idle, but it takes noticebly long to launch programs than in vista (especially programs like outlook 2k7). Vista is fast and snappy, and my current uptime is 12 days, because I loaned my laptop to someone for a presentation and they shut it down (normally I just standby). In terms of startup, 64-bit is a bit slower than 32, but vista is still faster to load than either version of windows 7 on this system (and xp is faster to the desktop, but then it sits there for a long time untill it actually opens anything). It is entirely an individual's own decsion on the OS they use, and should be based on what they like, rather than what they are told (which is what happened to vista).

This is definately a case of YMMV, but if the OP is happy with vista 32 bit, vista 64 bit is a nice evolutionary step that has no obvious changes in the operating envrioment, which is a very nice feature.

pianowizard wrote:I will upgrade my Dell Precision 390 from 32bit Vista Business to 64bit in a few days and will report whether it runs as well as 32bit.

I am now using 64bit Vista Business on this Precision and find it as snappy as when it had 32bit. Memory usage is 1.5GB at rest, but like craigmontHunter, I don't mind that.

Microsoft support for Vista Business will continue until April 2017. So, I can use my favorite Windows version for almost six more years! I am now installing 64bit Vista Business on my "new" Dell Optiplex 760.

I have just upgraded to windows 7 x64 and office 2010 for the simple reason I got an awesome deal (40$ for windows and 90$ for office - http://theultimatesteal.ca ). I am finding that it has longer startup times, uses a bit less ram when idle, and overall "feels" as snappy as vista did (or vice-verca, I'm not sure). There is on big issue I had with vista that always bugged me (not that it was that major), in that when I docked or undocked the system, woke it up out of standby, put it in standby and woke it up again, the favorites menu on the start menu would open the folder, not the menu, and it would do that untill I either docked/undocked the computer or restarted it .
While 7 does not have this issue, it seems to have half the battery life of vista 64 (2.5hrs vs 5) with the same settings. I am still playing with it, but unless you can get a great deal on it, or you need one of the features it has, I would not consider it to be a required upgrade from vista. If you have an xp computer that can handle vista/7, I would highly reccomend upgrading, since I have found them to have better memory management and all around performance when there are a lot of applications open and multiple users (I'm working on my parents for this reason - I think I have convinced my dad to take advantage of the vista license he has , since right now he is using downgrade rights)

On the other hand, Office 2010 is awesome, feels a lot faster than 2007, and has some neat new features .