W7 and memory upgrade

grumpybadger

grumpybadger

Alan Rickman
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Paul Beastall
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I have Windows 7 Home Premiun Upgrade Family Pack on order and plan to install 64bit on my main PC.

It currently has 4Gb RAM and I plan to upgrade to 8. Should I do this before installing W7 or after? Or doesn't it matter?

thanks

Paul
 
Cool stuff. Thanks both. Tempted to do the OS first and then add the memory. At least that way I am only trouble shooting one potential issue at a time (32 bit OS currently so can't upgrade memory with current OS)
 
Do it before you install W7 otherwise it will make you re-activatee W7 (which can go wrong)
 
neil_g said:
if youre talking about significant hardware changes, thats only classed as motherboard or greater..
Click to expand...

no, what I'm saying is that adding memory can be regarded as a change & W7 then wants to re-activate :bang:

It happened to me several times when I was swapping memory sticks (on Vista at the time)
 
mrgubby said:
no, what I'm saying is that adding memory can be regarded as a change & W7 then wants to re-activate :bang:

It happened to me several times when I was swapping memory sticks (on Vista at the time)
Click to expand...

shouldnt do, ive gone from 2gb to 4gb in my W7 HTPC and no prompt to reactivate.

it should only want to reactivate if there has been a "significant hardware change". changing the motherboard for example on an OEM copy of windows for example would require a call to MS to reactivate.
 
neil_g said:
shouldnt do, ive gone from 2gb to 4gb in my W7 HTPC and no prompt to reactivate.

it should only want to reactivate if there has been a "significant hardware change".
Click to expand...

I know it shouldn't, you know it shouldn't, but I don't think anybody told Microsoft :bang:
 
Right, well I've done the upgrade. Did the RAM first, checked it still booted to Vista (although it couldn't see the extra RAM) and then did a clean install of W7.

I have to say, so far, I'm very impressed. Easiest Windows installation I've ever done (and I've been installing Windows since v.3.0 almost 20 years ago) and everything has just worked. Lightroom is significantly better with 64bit now as well - perhaps I need to splash out on a 64 bit version of PS too then?

Is PS Elements 64bit now?
 
I know tha PSE 7 is not 64bit and I do not think PS 8 is either, it would be the only reason I would consider upgrading.

Having said PSE 7 runs very well on W7 64 Bit and I do not have any performance problems, but I do run a ludicrous PC ;-)
 
Memory upgrades shouldn't trigger a re-activation. Nevertheless I've had to reactivate my copy of Vista before, which was obtained through my university for free when I was a student. The telephone process was automated and took a few minutes to complete before I was on my way again - I must admit I was pretty impressed.
 
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