DescentBB

Looking at Costco and they have
Win 7 Home Premium for $189 or
Windows 7 Home Premium Family Pack 3-PCs for $124.99

What's the diff. Can't see why you wouldn't buy the $124 box.

The family pack are all usally the "upgrade" versions.

I'll ck that out.

Any reason not to use the 64 bit on the Dell Inspiron 530?

You might want to check if your CPU supports 64-bit.

Inspiron 530,Intel Core2 Duo processor E8200 (2.66GHz,1333FSB) w/Dual Core Technology and 6MB cache

Requirements WINDOWS 7 HOME PREMIUM, FULL

DVD-ROM drive
1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
1 gigabyte (GB) RAM (32-bit) or 2 GB RAM (64-bit)
16 GB available hard disk space (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit)
DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver

for future reference: http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/cpu-z.html

Cool, thanks.

If the processor was made in the last five or six years, chances are good that it's 64-bit. That said, you'd be foolish to not go with a 64-bit OS these days. Windows 7 will be the final flavor that will have a 32-bit version.

Any way to tell from the specs. I doubt if it was. Bought it in May 08. It came with XP installed.

Inspiron 530,Intel Core2 Duo processor E8200 (2.66GHz,1333FSB) w/Dual Core Technology and 6MB
cache

What happens if I try to install 64 bit on a 32 bit system?

thewolfe wrote:What happens if I try to install 64 bit on a 32 bit system?

Probably nothing happens, it just won't work.

I don't think Intel ever made a Core 2 that couldn't handle 64 bit.

Most likely you'll get some kind of "invalid boot disk" error when trying to boot off the 64-bit installation media and it won't go anywhere past that. If you run it from Windows it'll tell you that the executable is invalid and (depending on Windows version perhaps) to check whether you're running the correct (32-bit vs 64-bit) executable.

you know, CPU-Z would answer that question right off the bat...

Hint: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64

That machine no longer boots up is there a way to run CPU-Z?

This:

http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd

might be just what you need. I think I'm going to download it myself.

[edit]

Download from here: http://www.hirensbootcd.org/

Now that looks like something to have laying around. Thanks.

easiest way to figure out the CPU is run the code on the CPU through google.... like my older P4 EE was a "SL7CH"

this is what i get in return for googling that code:


http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=27490

and

http://www.cpu-world.com/sspec/SL/SL7CH.html



get that code and google it.

There are ways to find out without taking apart the computer.

you know i never figured out how to read the code without looking on the CPU itself... lol