Can I make my fairly old XP computer "dual-boot" with Win 7 64-bit?

If you can get the drivers for it then it wil be a qualified yes, you need a separate partition to install windows 7 onto.  How well it will run is something only you can determine.  More ram would be nice and speed things up considerably.

I wouldn't recommend it. First of all, 2Gb of RAM is really low for Win 7 64-bit. And 30Gb is a bit low on disk space, but you will technically be able to do it. So, you'll need to do the following:

1. Before you do anything, find all hardware drivers that you'll need, and make sure that they are actually available for Win 7 x64.

2. Use disk partitioning software to resize your current XP partition to make it smaller, and leave at least 20 Gb of space unpartitioned (and the more the better) for the new OS.

3. Install Win 7 on the new partition

4, I don't remember if the Win 7 bootloader allows dual-booting with XP, and if it doesn't, you'll need to find some guides on how to make that happen (installing Grub would be my suggestion)

2 GB RAM is fine for Windows 7 and it'll run better than XP. Personally though I wouldn't keep XP as the last updates have been published and it is no longer supported. Just go for Windows 7 and don't bother about a dual boot.

Windows 7 fits nicely on 30 GB (it requires about 15 GB for the OS), but you don't have much room left for further software if you want to install it on the same partition.

Whether you can install the 64 bit version of Windows 7 depends on your CPU. If it is an older Celeron it could only be a 32 bit CPU. So first make sure it is a 32 bit Celeron...

Hi Guys, well it's an old computer - probably about 7 or 8 years old so it's probably not 64-bit compatible, eh? In Control Panel|System it says:

eMachines
T3990
Intel(R)
Celeron(R) CPU 2.80GHZ
1.98 GB of RAM

I don't know if it's a 32-bit Celeron or not...


Guys, I don't really have too many hardware attachments on this computer - not even a printer. I used it mostly as a stock trading/analysis machine some years ago. I'm not sure what I'd need in the way of hardware drivers...

If I can just "barely" get Win 7 x64 on this, that'd be fine with me. I don't plan on running a large amount of apps on it. I simply want the Win 7 x64 to test the installation of an app I'm developing on 64 bit systems.

Michael-Best: I ran the upgrade advisor... attached is a screenshot of the result. I noticed it did not have a separate tab for "64-bit" as I saw in the sample on the download page.... maybe that is not a good sign  :-(.

Thanks All!
   Shawn
Win7-64.JPG

Add I said earlier, it will run win 7 x64, but very slowly. Abd you'll still need to find all the drivers

Rindi: I ran SIW - what should I be looking for to check for 64-bit compatibility?

Thanks
   Shawn

In the hardware, CPU Info section under number of bits it would have to say 64 bits. It is also possible that the exact CPU model is shown.

Rindi, next to "Number of Bits", it says 32. Attached is a screenshot of the SIW output. Looks like I'm out of luck I guess, eh?

Thanks
   Shawn
SIW.JPG

yes you are out of luck without upgrading the system

Correct. You can only run 32 bit OS's on that CPU. But as I said earlier, Windows 7 32 bit will run fine.

Thank you guys. Well so much for that idea then!

Cheers
    Shawn

you can buy a second hand system with more than double the cpu speed, double the ram, and a larger harddrive for less than a hundred bucks at least you can in Canada. Then you be happy with the performance of the system. In your old system your mobo probably will not support more ram, although you could probably upgrade the cpu, but then the harddrive is small. Your system will not be usable using a 64 bit operating system.

Thanks for awarding the points, glad to help.

Thanks Web_tracker, yep I'm in Canada and I'm gonna look around for a 2nd hand system on Kijiji or something... Thanks!