Up grade my currant PC to Windows 7, 64 or not, is the question.

[Bill Koenig]

I need some advice.
My currant PC is 4 years old, its a Dell precision 380 work station, its been a fine machine up until now. What's changed,  now I working with stitched images, HDR and large file sizes and I need more memory.
My PC is capable of running a 64 bit OS and a max 8 GB of ram, so I'm thinking of going with a dual boot setup.
I work for the University of Wisconsin and I can buy software at discount so CS5 and Windows 7 ultimate 64 will cost me about $250.00, 8 GB of ram $275.00.
The cost of a new PC loaded up with ram is over $1500.00 and a new one is out of the question for at least a year. Also, when I do decide to upgrade my PC, I should be able to transfer my software over to a new PC, so just for the cost of more ram, I'm up and running.
What would you do?

[walter.sk]

I need some advice.
My currant PC is 4 years old, its a Dell precision 380 work station, its been a fine machine up until now. What's changed,  now I working with stitched images, HDR and large file sizes and I need more memory.
My PC is capable of running a 64 bit OS and a max 8 GB of ram, so I'm thinking of going with a dual boot setup.
I work for the University of Wisconsin and I can buy software at discount so CS5 and Windows 7 ultimate 64 will cost me about $250.00, 8 GB of ram $275.00.
The cost of a new PC loaded up with ram is over $1500.00 and a new one is out of the question for at least a year. Also, when I do decide to upgrade my PC, I should be able to transfer my software over to a new PC, so just for the cost of more ram, I'm up and running.
What would you do?

I upgraded a Dell XPS 730 from  XP 32-bits and 4Gb of ram to Windows7 Ultimate, 64bits and 8Gb of ram.  My Photoshop CS4 ran much, much faster, as did many of the plug-ins, with the upgrade.  I now use Photoshop CS5 and I am very pleased with both the 64-bit and 32-bit flavors, and will stick with the 64bit CS5 exclusively as soon as the upgrades for the NIK software catch up.

[semillerimages]

Bill,
I built a system 4 years ago in anticipation of using a 64bit version of Vista on it eventually.
It's a dual core, dual Opteron system which has served me very well in the last four years running XP Professional because Vista just didn't appeal to me considering it's problems.
A couple weeks ago I installed Win7 64bit as an upgrade along with an extra 4 gigs of memory. It was a clean install with a new hard drive and I have yet to have a problem. The system does not seem to be much snappier than before, but it does perform admirably well for it's age - running 64bit versions of CS5 and Lightroom 3 along with Bridge, Firefox, Backblaze (an online backup service) and various other bits of software on occassion - all at the same time. Nary a hickup, no crashes, knock on wood!
It's quite a thrill to see photoshop eat up 6 gigs of memory and watching all 4 cores get a workout at the same time.
It was well worth the upgrade price for me.


*steve

I need some advice.
My currant PC is 4 years old, its a Dell precision 380 work station, its been a fine machine up until now. What's changed,  now I working with stitched images, HDR and large file sizes and I need more memory.
My PC is capable of running a 64 bit OS and a max 8 GB of ram, so I'm thinking of going with a dual boot setup.
I work for the University of Wisconsin and I can buy software at discount so CS5 and Windows 7 ultimate 64 will cost me about $250.00, 8 GB of ram $275.00.
The cost of a new PC loaded up with ram is over $1500.00 and a new one is out of the question for at least a year. Also, when I do decide to upgrade my PC, I should be able to transfer my software over to a new PC, so just for the cost of more ram, I'm up and running.
What would you do?