I am running my Vostro 420 with Windows 7 RC2.  I tried Vista 64Bit without success as tons of drivers were not working properly.  With W7 64Bit it just flies.  I pumped the memory up to 8GB and it is quite snappy.  Why don't you install a dual boot machine?  You will scratch XP once you work with W7.

Jay

I am running Windows 7 on a spare drive.  Finding 64 bit drivers can be a challenge. 

I wonder whether the Windows 7 upgrade disc form Dell will include utilities to upgrade from Vista (no I run XP not Vista, just curious)?  Also wondering whether the 64 bit version of Windows 7 willl also be included.

What are the 64Bit drivers you have issues with?  I have heared that there is an Vista to W7 procedure to upgrade but I usually do a clean install.  You know, there is always stuff on the system that needs to be cleaned out in order to make it run smooth and then I never trust upgrades really,

Jay

According to Microsoft there is no direct upgrade path from XP to 7.  XP is allowed to upgrade rights to 7 but there is no direct way to an XP installation to 7, you must do a clean install.  As for 64 bit drivers, most vendors have drivers out for their hardware, there are a few devices that will not have a driver, but most big companies do have 64 bit drivers.  I have been running 64 bit Vista since it came out and have had no problems with drivers.

I did a custom install of Windows 7 64bit from my former Vista 64 bit OS, since the upgrade failed. I had to unload the ATI drivers/software for my HD5770 video card.

What is amazing is that of the first  three "microsoft updates", after installing windows 7, were the dell monitor driver, the ATI video driver and the old Brother printer driver.

Apparently the Windows 7 64 bit drivers are fairly available from "microsoft updates".

I cannot run the latest BIOS update on the 64 bit OS, though.

I have 8gB of  RAM installed. It is really too bad Dell does not support 64 bit OS on the Vostro 420, but it works fine without all the Dell drivers.

Don

Hi Don

I have my machine with 64Bit and 8GB of memory and it works just fine.  The BIOS seems to be an issue even with the 32Bit version.  What I did was creating a bootable USB stick and started the update from DOS.  Worked like a charm and now I am on BIOS 1.2.

Regarding the drivers, I can recommend Driver Genius Professional Edition.  That thing gets updates for drivers you never thought of checking.  The good thing is the DB with the drivers gets updated about 1 every week or so I(sometimes 10 days).  http://www.plimus.com/jsp/buynow.jsp?contractId=2402296

hey, for $30 you can't go wrong!

Jay

I tried updating my BIOS (still at 1.0.2) with a bootable USB stick (Windows 98 DOS) and it always hangs, it doesn't matter if I'm trying to upgrade to 1.0.4 or 1.2.0, it stops after "Invoke the exe file!" followed by a few carriage returns, after I press "Y". How did you create your USB drive? Mine is Kingston DataTraveler, 8GB, formatted with FAT32 and Windows 98 DOS.

I think you need to format with NTFS format boot from maybe a newer version windows.

I just upgraded my Netbook from Win XP 32 bit to Win 7 32 bit using a 4gB HP USB FLASH drive, after I made an ISO bootable image from my win 7 install disk.

I created the bootable USB FLASH drive from Win7 64 bit, using "unetbootin-windows-377.exe" to load the ISO file to the USB FLASH drive

and "uiso9_pe.exe" to make the Win7 image from the DVD install disk.

Don

I'm not trying to upgrade OSes, I'm trying to upgrade BIOS. On any version of Vista or Windows 7, 32 or 64bit, the BIOS flash tool doesn't work. I already have Windows 7 64bit installed, which is why I need to flash my BIOS using a DOS bootdisk. I don't think your advice applies here.

Jay, how did you do the initial install of W7 64 bit? I keep ending up with a black screen and a mouse cursor.

Bill