E6500: help with upgrading from vista 32 to windows 7 X64

I'm about to upgrade from vista 32 to windows 7 X64.
I have a Dell E6500 with a:
P8400, Nvidia 160M, 4gb ram

I've heard I need to do a clean install - How do I do this?
Will these programs work -
Office 2007, Vuze, Greedytorrent, firefox, FormatFactory, powerIso & adobe cs4?
I already have the 64 bit nod32.

Is the upgrade to 64 bit worth it?
What drivers should I install?
What else do I need to know?

Gosh, I'm kind of anxious about this...

 

Using a 64-bit OS will allow you to take full advantage of having 4GB+ of memory. 32-bit operating systems can only access usually around 3.2GB maximum.

Office 2007, Firefox and Adobe CS4 will definitely work on Windows 7. Not sure about the other applications.

What drivers you need will depend on your configuration (webcam, fingerprint reader etc). Dell has some Windows 7 drivers for the E6500 here: http://support.dell.com/support/dow...emID=LAT_E6500&hidos=WLH&hidlang=en&TabIndex=
Windows 7 has lots of drivers already so I don't know if you'll need drivers for things such as Wifi, modem, webcam etc. Definitely grab the Nvidia driver and Dell ControlPoint if you need any of its features.

Have fun with Windows 7 .

 

Note: if you encounter a reduce battery life with Win7.. it's probably a lack of official drivers. Just wait until Oct22nd (or whenever Dell release all the drivers) for the real drivers to be released, and then you can freak out if your affected with the latest drivers.

Latest Quadro/Geforce drivers for the Nvidia Quadro NVS 160M (yea, you can use either for this GPU), form nvidia.com. Make sure you select the Mobile version of the video card. If you decide to use Geforce drivers, it is the teh Geforce 9000M series (any 9000M they are all link to the same driver)

 

If you are puzzled after you upgrade by a yellow exclamation mark in Device Manage next to a device called something like Broadcom USH, get the Dell CcontrolPoint Security drivers. If you want, choose custom when you install, and the only thing that you apparently need to install is ControlVault.

No idea what it's for, but the exclamation point goes away and the device becomes Dell ControlVault.

The download is huge at over 100MB, but if you do the custom install it only takes a few actual megs.

 

hi everyone
I want to install windows7 64 too but my question is should I full format my H.D.D to successfully instalation or it's not depend on it
thank for any help beforehand