Windows Choice: XP Home or Windows 7 Pro 32 bit or 64 bit?

My WinXP homebuilt pc is showing signs of motherboard problems to come and sooner or later will require some work. Also, at 10 years old, it must be a little behind the times.

I could stay with Windows XP Home (I have an unopened/unused WinXP just for this purpose which I bought when Vista was introduced) or do I go for Windows 7?

Which then begs the questions, Home or Pro, 32 bit or 64 bit?

One thing is for certain, it will NOT be Windows 8 !!!

What are the pros and cons?

Thanks for reading.

Cheers!

Purely my own personal perception (I'm certainly no expert):-

Home or Pro?
I personally cannot see the benefit of Pro in a Home situation - unless you have extensive Servers at Home.

32 or 64 Bit?
I'm running 64bit &, to date, I've not incurred any problems running any Applications (some are running in 32 bit mode). Running in 64bit does permit using significantly more RAM than 3-GB, meaning that Memory intensive Applications don't need to resort to HDD access..

64-bit is the way to go. Whatever your solution, get a minimum of 4GB RAM and ever wonder if it's enough. My Vista setup uses 1.2GB RAM just to start-up and it's a decently tweaked system. You'll use up to 2GB then you'll want another Gig or two for other things.

Windows 7 is the system that Vista should have been, and I'm led to believe that with tweaking, it's as close to Windows 7 as can be (start-up speed being the exception).

Main Con of 64-bit is that some older programs with a 16-bit installer will not run. Check your software and make the decision based on that. I've lost a few programs to 64-bit, but one adapts and moves forward. 99% of what I have lost was me hanging on to old, familiar software. 32-bit installer programs will run fine on 64-bit. With 64-bit Windows there's a 'Program Files' and a 'Program Files (x86)', the latter being the 32-bit area.

Cons of 32-bit: memory limitations. File size limitations. Obsolete hardware.

Pros of 32-bit...The opposite of the 64-bit cons.

Make the change and don't look back.

I went down the same route. Installed win7 on my machine - super. Then I found most of my programs wouldn't work. Small things like accounts and my super borland database, so they had to be run on on an old machine as 64bit win7 really is typical microsoft unforgiving.
You can go 32bit to 64bit, but not the other way round.
If you have old programs then oracle have a lovely program so you can run your old XP at the same time as Win 7 64bit (the win7 pro requires a restart!!), so win 7 home is a nice happy medium.
Then I found Windows 7 starter. 32bit, runs all my old programs - but you can't actually buy it!

Definitely XP 64bit with plenty of RAM - I have a Win7 machine but only use it for video editing since it handles H.264 video by default better than XP but I wouldn�t use Win7 for anything else.

Win 7 Home Premium 64-bit. I presume you're getting a new processor, etc so it will support 64-bit with the memory benefits. One thing to expect is a huge amount of downloading by Windows Update. Win XP is out of support now, I believe; I always found it a pretty decent OS but 7 seems more stable. I suggest a MoBo with UEFI and support for the secure computing stuff in Win 8 should that ever look viable!

Microsoft will stop providing any updates for XP from next year.
Application developers will also stop prior to that or just after that.

Website developers are already stopping developing for older XP supported IE.

So, please go with Windows 7 64Bit.

Is this for a new PC?

Go with Windows 8 and save yourself the bother.

In reply to a post by normcall:

I went down the same route. Installed win7 on my machine - super. Then I found most of my programs wouldn't work. Small things like accounts and my super borland database, so they had to be run on on an old machine as 64bit win7 really is typical microsoft unforgiving.
You can go 32bit to 64bit, but not the other way round.
If you have old programs then oracle have a lovely program so you can run your old XP at the same time as Win 7 64bit (the win7 pro requires a restart!!), so win 7 home is a nice happy medium.
Then I found Windows 7 starter. 32bit, runs all my old programs - but you can't actually buy it!

Microsoft provide a virtual machine running XP called 'XP Mode' - I use it for unsupported software on my Win 7 64 bit system. Free and no need to worry about transferring your old XP license.

Obvious answer
Dual boot XP and Win7 64 bit to get the best of both worlds