Is it worth upgrading from Vista to 7?

[sherlockfan99]

Hello, I'm thinking about upgrading my Dad's fairly old HP G60 laptop (which currently has Windows Vista) to Windows 7 but I'm not sure if it will be fast enough to run it, every time I use the laptop a program like Google Chrome or itunes will just freeze. Will it really have a big improvement on the performance and what is the benefit of 64-bit? Thanks.

Here are the specs:
AMD Athlon Dual-Core QL-62 (2.00 GHz)
3 GB RAM
Windows Vista (32-bit)
NVIDIA GeForce 8200M G
1366 x 768 Resolution

 

[das_stig]

Vista SP2 is 85-90% the way to Win7.

More likely you need to do a refresh of the laptop.

Backup any important files, use the HP recovery setup to do a full factory restore.
Then uninstall all the crap that HP preinstalls, like 60 day anti-virus, etc.
Apply all the updates.
Add secuirty software.

My son has the exact same laptop and with a vanilla Vista install works very well.
Last time I rebuilt it, I did switch to Win7 and it does perform a little better, but not worth paying the £££.

 

[hang-the-9]

As above, the issue is very likely due to just an old Windows setup, a bunch of programs not needed installed over the years, spyware or viruses on the system. If Vista worked fine before, doing a clean setup after backing up the files and taking note of settings will be a good idea. You can run the system migration wizard, that will create a file with everything you need which can be used to restore things. Although it would be safer to do a manual backup of My Documents, Desktop and Favorites in addition to that just in case of file corruption or something else going wrong.

Then just wipe the drive with the restore disks and do a clean seutup.