Chapter 22. Installing and Running Windows 7

Windows 7 is the latest version of the Windows operating system for personal computers. Unlike earlier releases of Windows, Windows 7 is hardware-independent and ships on media as a modular disk image.

Thanks to Windows 7’s new hardware-independent architecture, all editions of Windows 7 support both 32-bit and 64-bit hardware. This means that every product edition can be used with computers that have either 32-bit or 64-bit architecture. Microsoft provides separate installation media for 32-bit computers and 64-bit computers.