Is my hardware too old to upgrade to windows 10?

Phoenix_Fury

Distinguished
Sep 30, 2007
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0
18,510
I am currently on Vista 32, but it is increasingly not supported anymore by games or browsers, so I need an upgrade.

But I don't want to have to buy a new motherboard, videocard, soundcard, etc because they all still work fine for the games I play.
It would also be nice to have a 64 bit OS as some games take advantage of it.

ASUS P5ND
Intel Core 2 Duo E6850
Geforce GTX260
Soundblaster XFI Fatality Pro.

My concern is that, as with my motherboard drivers, they may not even have an option for downloading windows 10. Does it even matter?
Or is my only real option to go with windows 7 until I decide to build a new computer entirely?

 

kraelic

Distinguished
Feb 12, 2006
940
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Basically, you are the product just like Facebook. They sell your data to make money and they hope you spend money in the microsoft store, so you can run it without activation if you can deal with the nag to activate watermark in the desktop corner and the lack of changing the wallpaper. You can buy a license through the store too after you run the 'trial'

https://www.windowscentral.com/you-do-not-need-activate-windows-10
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator


That same telemetry has been backported into Win 7 & 8. So no help there.

Win 10 is not 'free'. You can run it unactivated, seemingly forever. I have a long running test of an Unavtivated Win 10 Pro in a VM, just to see what happens with this.
18 months, and it still runs like day one.

Or, many people have reported that the Upgrade from a valid Win 7 or 8.1 still works. Might be worth a try.
 

Colif

Win 11 Master
Moderator


Concern about drivers is a valid one - Problem is windows 10 doesn't support the Nvidia chipset motherboard has, Nvidia don't even support it anymore. You motherboard doesn't have any newer drivers after windows 7. I had a P5N32e SLI before i got current PC and never even thought to install anything after win 7 on it.

You would struggle just to boot off the install USB as it has no drivers that support Nvidia chipset.

Vista has no upgrade path to win 10 so you would be stuck as your only choice would be to install win 7 and then upgrade it to win 10. Due to changes in how windows 10 handles driver signatures, there is a chance this still wouldn't work.

I would install Win 7 64 bit and buy a new PC later as though hardware works, software is another story.