New laptop

[scott6840]

I just received a new Acer Aspire 5733Z-4477 laptop to replace my old HP Pavilion dv1000. I've had the HP for a number of years and consequently have a great number of applications installed that I want to keep.

The Acer currently has Win7 Home Premium 64-Bit installed; The Hp has XP Pro 32-bit. Both machines have Seagate HDDs installed so I can use Seagate's version of Acronis to clone the HP drive to the Acer drive. If I do this I will not have to reinstall all of the HP applications on the Acer.

I don't do any gaming or any processor intensive applications with the possible exception of a little graphics design using GIMP so the question is "What kind of performance issues will I encounter if I continue to use a 32-bit OS on a 64-bit processor? I know there will be some degradation but will it be enough to offset the days it will take to reinstall all my apps?

A corollary to the first question is that I can (according to Microsoft) upgrade the XP Pro to Win7 Pro without having to do a "clean" install (i.e. Reinstall all the apps). Would it be advantageous to upgrade to Win7 Pro, give the above scenario?

Thanks for your help.

 

[killersquirel11]

Bad things will happen if you try to clone that. The only real performance issue you will notice with the 32-bit OS is that it is limited to 4GB of memory. Using Windows XP, however, wouldn't really be advisable. It's almost falling into the unsupported range of its lifespan. I'd really strongly urge you to just move cleanly over and manually install all of your applications again. Odds are you'll leave a decent amount of crapware behind and end up with a much faster computer.