Will windows 7 oem 32bit cdkey work on 64bit?

[gargus]

My neighbor is wanting to move his PC to windows 64bit and double his ram for gaming. He is a teacher and got the disc through his school so its a OEM disc and says that it is 32bit on the disc. It might even be a upgrade disc I cant remember now but I can work around that.

My question is can I install 64bit off of my disc I have and use his cdkey without problems? Or do we need to get a all new 64bit version?

I just would hate to do it and find out it wont work and waste all of that time and end up keeping his PC down a couple extra days while we get a new disc.

 

[JDFan]

The 32 bit and 64 bit keys are interchangeable so it should work fine -- that said you do realize that going from 32 bit to 64 bit means a complete wipe of the HDD and installing of different drivers for the hardware - so make sure that all of the hardware on his system does have 64 bit drivers available and be sure to back up any personal data before proceeding.

With the cheap price of HDDs these days I'd suggest buying a new HDD and installing the 64 bit OS to it after unplugging the old HDD from the system - get everything up and running (including activating using the old key) - that way you will stil have the old HDD untouched in case something does go wrong. (you can just remove the new HD and reinstall the old HDD and be back to step 1 with no data loss from reformatting the old HDD to install the 64 bit OS.) Figure $40 for a new HDD is cheap insurance in case you find something does not work properly or some of his hardware does not have proper 64 bit drivers.

Figure doing it this way you can revert to the old HDD if things do not go as planned with no downtime. and if things do go well can then just plug the old HDD in as a second HDD and copy all the personal data off of it without having to make a back up before starting saving some time. THen after all is working and you retrieve everything needed off of the old HDD you can either remove it and keep it stored away in case anything ever goes wrong ( you have a backup to resort to) or reformat the old HDD and have the extra storage capacity.

 

[gargus]

Oh yeah all of his hardware is current. I completely rebuilt his pc with new parts just a year ago. He has a new NVidia 760 on the way now and another 4 gb of ram coming as well. So driver support isn't an issue.

And yes I know a HD wipe is in order which isn't a problem. Really all he uses it for is email, surfing the web and gaming. He is in his 60s so he doesn't like store anything on there at all. Its mostly just for battlefield.

Ive just never used educator oem versions of discs and when it specifically said 32bit I wasn't sure if the cdkey was tied to a 32bit version or not. He only paid like 9 dollars for it from the school he teaches at.

 

[JDFan]

Then it should be fine --- You will most likely need to do the Phone activation process and\or speak to a representative - just answer the questions they ask - (ie. most likely will ask if this is being installed onto the same system and whether the software is still being used on any other system) - just key in the answer or tell the rep and then it will give you an activation response code to type in to activate the install.