HP desktop win7 32bit to win10 64bit Possible?

hello i have a old hp pavilion a6207c running win7 32bit. Its pretty slow and i wanted to upgrade the OS. Would it be possible to do windows 10?

I would use Macrium Reflect Free to create a backup image of the current installation onto a removable hard drive and then try the upgrade to Windows 10.

Do I have to format the storage? I Just tried installing w10 and I got up to "Getting files ready for installation" and a error appears and the pc restarts.

Also, sorry, I just noticed the title of your thread - you can only upgrade 32-bit Windows 7 to 32-bit Windows 10, you can't go directly to 64-bit. Did you download 32-bit Windows 10?

How are you trying to do the upgrade?

Which storage are you asking about formatting? While doing the upgrade itself, you do not format the partition that Windows 7 is on. Run the Windows 10 setup.exe from within the running Windows 7. If you are talking about saving an image of the existing Windows 7 as a backup with Macrium Reflect Free, then the storage location you are going to save the image to should be formatted as NTFS.

I had dowloaded win10 64 bit and burnt it to a dvd

SassinPr0ph3cy said:

I had dowloaded win10 64 bit and burnt it to a dvd

Unfortunately, you will need to start with the 32-bit upgrade. Then you will put the DVD with 32-bit Windows 10 in the drive with Windows 7 running and run setup.exe from the DVD. Once you get upgraded to 32-bit Windows 10, it will hopefully still activate itself, even though the free upgrade period is officially over - but people are still getting free activations. Once you get Windows 10 32-bit activated with a digital license, then if you want to move to 64-bit Windows 10 you will have to wipe out the 32-bit installation and do a clean install of Windows 10 64-bit.

Personally, I would advise against it.

HP stopped producing Win10 drivers for their Win7 PCs some time ago, and when you do Upgrade, you'll be stuck using the drivers that Microsoft provides.

While this might not cause any problems, if you have something like Switchable graphics, that will cause problems because HP does not have the Win10 video drivers you would need to properly handle that,

Mark Phelps said:

Personally, I would advise against it.

HP stopped producing Win10 drivers for their Win7 PCs some time ago, and when you do Upgrade, you'll be stuck using the drivers that Microsoft provides.

While this might not cause any problems, if you have something like Switchable graphics, that will cause problems because HP does not have the Win10 video drivers you would need to properly handle that,

Which is the reason for the advice to make a backup image of Windows 7 before the upgrade. User upgrades to Windows 10, doesn't like the way the hardware works, restore Windows 7 backup image. All that is lost is time.

And, I just got done restoring a HP laptop for a friend that tried to do the OS reset herself and ended up with no bootable OS. I fought for about 4 hours to get a clean install of Windows 10 to work with the switchable graphics on the laptop and couldn't, so I ended up re-installing Windows 7 and spending 12 hours letting it do Windows 7 updates. She got the computer back from me and then asked me if she could upgrade to Windows 10 again because she had previously. I had created a Macrium Reflect backup image of Windows 7 after the updates and stashed it on a hidden partition at the end of her hard drive so told her, "go ahead and try. Just do NOT reformat the entire hard drive! If you don't like the way the Windows 10 upgrade ends up, it will take me about 10 minutes to get you back to Windows 7 - as long as you don't format the entire hard drive!"

The type of processor (Athlon 64 X2 (B) 4400+ 2.3 GHz) on the HP Pavilion a6207c Desktop indicate that it should run Windows 10 32-bit, but will fail to run the 64-bit version due to some required features (CMPXCHG16B) in the CPU instruction set being unavailable.

Even with some kludge workarounds, upon which I shall not elaborate, the system would run into problems with each build update by failing this requirement.