Dell 9200 upgrade

[Rekusu]

What ho one and all,

I currently have a Dell 9200 running XP Pro with 2.40 gigahertz Intel Core2 Quad Q6600 and 3gb of RAM. Old, yes, but it still works.

Just bumped into a video showing how to upgrade to 8gb (although apparently, XP will only use 3gb) and the final caption was, that he plans to upgrade to W7, 64 bit.

My hardware will handle 64 bit but I have never tried with XP as with little RAM, does not seem to be worth the effort.

But would increasing the RAM to 8gb allow me to install 64 bit W7 and have a generally faster and may be more stable computer?

Or is a Dell 9200 Dimension to old to bother upgrading. I can't 't really afford a major upgrade because it would involve a new computer, OS and too many programs and XP is doing fine. But it is slow with Photoshop and more RAM would help.

Grateful for any comments

Thanks and toodle pip

[jdc2000]

That CPU should support Windows 7 64 Bit. You would need to reinstall your applications, but you would be able to use 8 GB of RAM which would definitely speed things up.

I would make a system image of the XP installation before trying any upgrade, just in case.

Possibly useful links:

https://www.dell.com/community/Windo...t/ta-p/5190625

https://www.dell.com/community/Windo...t/td-p/3758657

[Midknyte]

You'd have to do a clean install anyway, so you might want to use a different hard drive or even get an SSD instead.

You should download the Windows 7 drivers before doing the install.

As jdc2000 said, make a backup first.

[Rekusu]

Gentlemen,

Really appreciate the replies. Yes, I know I would have to reinstall everything, not a problem; only time.

And yes, i would make a image of my current XP OS (have it already just in case!!) and would find another HDD to install W7. since it would be a work in progress, I would switch between XP HDD and teh W7 HDD until I had 7 up and running.

[Midknyte]

Do you already have the 8GB RAM or not? If not, you might want to price out an SSD instead. That would significantly speed things up.