I have a acer aspire 9410-4933 laptop with Windows Vista home premium, it only runs 1 gig, is 4 gigs too much? would upgrading to windows 7 be the best option?

To be honest, i wouldnt. Firstly you must be running Windows 7 or 8 first, if you are going to do an upgrade (free) and even the you will need at least 8 gig of ram to run it properly as well as a decent hard drive and with all the hassles with W10 at the moment, i would wait. As for your laptop, its reasonably old and i would say, no dont do it. You dont have to, but Microsoft is pushing it on people worldwide, even though it still has some bad issues. Stay with your Vista or Windows 7. Vista is old and decrepit, but it still goes at least.

They may also not be compatible with WIndows 7.

Most likely you should be able to install windows 7. I checked with Microsoft's minimum requirements, and your computer seems to fit the criteria

Operating System Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2
Windows XP Home with Service Pack 2
Windows Vista Home Premium
Windows Vista Home Basic
Windows Vista Starter

1. Before upgrading to windows 7, you must check the specification of your acer aspire 5315.

2. Windows 7 is better than windows vista but if you are really wanted those acer programs to work. You have to downgrade your operating system from your previous operating system.

The free upgrade is sent out by the laptops manf. directly to you as long as you bought the laptop in the past 4 months. It is regardless of the current version of Windows Vista that you are running. According to an article found here

"Acer says "shipments will begin in increments. All orders will be handled on a first-in, first-out basis." So if you bought a computer last week, you could be at the end of a long line."

Best you can do at the moment is just wait, your not going to be able to do much till Acer ships out that upgrade. Even if you did install Windows Vista Premium, you would be stuck till you got the Windows 7 from the manf.

Upgrade to Windows 7 in October. Never, ever install Vista again.

Hey there you want to use vista?? lol good luck. You need a min of 2 gigs ram to run vista but should ideally have 4 gigs for good operation. vista is a memory hog. You can change the configuration to use less but still need at least 2 gigs
seth

2GB is quite low but you will never see the full amount of ram.
Your video card will use some and then Windows reserves some for itself.
You dont say if its 2x2gb sticks or just one, if two does bios see the full 4gb. Check the memory is properly seated. Try swapping the sticks round.

Windows 32-bit operating systems cannot physically see 4 GB of memory. The most you can see is 3 GB. And, assuming you have onboard video, 1/2 GB is going for video memory, thereby showing you only have 2.5. The only way to solve this is to install either Windows XP or Vista 64-bit operating system to fully utilize your 4 GB of memory.

Thanks and please take a moment to rate as fixya.

If you install Vista on your machine be sure to back up all of the important files you have on your computer BEFORE you do the upgrade. You will most likely lose all of your files when you upgrade as it will be an operating system switch. As far as Vista goes it is, in my opinion, a better operating system than XP. The only downside is it takes a little bit more power to run it. I would not recommend upgrading unless you have at least 1 gig of RAM and a decent processor. (In order to check this simply right click on your My Computer icon and click "Properties" and you can see what you have there). If you have at least 1 gig of RAM and a decent processor then by all means upgrade!