32bit and 64bit mess

[ccd]

I have a very unique situation. Long story short, I bought a vista home premium 32bit laptop and had it replaced with a vista home premium 64bit laptop under warranty. Somehow I lost the recovery disc for my current laptop(the 64bit) so I used the 32bit recovery disc to reinstall the os. It works fine, except of course now I only have 3gig ram instead of 4, and some of my drivers aren't compatible. My question is, is there any way of installing the 64bit version of vista home premium on my computer using the 32bit recovery disc? I have heard that all I need is the vista disc and my 64bit product key, but it never asks for a product key during installation.

 

[The Howling Wolves]

Have you tried System Restore back to when VHP 64 bit was working properly?

 

[NoelDP]

I have a very unique situation. Long story short, I bought a vista home premium 32bit laptop and had it replaced with a vista home premium 64bit laptop under warranty. Somehow I lost the recovery disc for my current laptop(the 64bit) so I used the 32bit recovery disc to reinstall the os. It works fine, except of course now I only have 3gig ram instead of 4, and some of my drivers aren't compatible. My question is, is there any way of installing the 64bit version of vista home premium on my computer using the 32bit recovery disc? I have heard that all I need is the vista disc and my 64bit product key, but it never asks for a product key during installation.

You need to contact the manufacturer, and order a set of 64-bit Reccovery DIsks for your computer.

(System Restore will NOT do anything for you)


Having said that, with only 4GB there's not much point in going to 64-bit, since 32-bit *does* use all 4GB, although some of it is reserved for hardware, and so not declared as available for OS use - it's more a case of semantics than anything else.

 

[Patonb]

No, 32Bit technically sees 4 Gigs, but you then need to subtract the system ram too. So you only see about 3.23.6Gigs.

You can use another legitimate 64bit disk, as in from a friend, but it needs to be a vanilla disk, not an oem recovery disk.