Dell Inspiron N5110.

Dell switched to 64bit OS pretty early on. They only ship 64bit edition of Windows 7 in India and probably elsewhere. I have seen similar complaints earlier this year. So, this is not surprising.

I think it was/is a good decision. There are very few reasons to run 32bit edition of Windows 7 today. Can you tell me why you decided to use a 32bit edition of Win7?

About the drivers, you can technically search for the 32bit editions on the manufacturers websites. Most should be detected by Windows automatically. I would assume that the networking related hardware would be the major cause of concern as they are sometimes from companies like atheros etc.

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something worth trying out though.

contact https://twitter.com/#!/dellcares

ask them about the specific driver you want and they might be able to help you out. some or the other model might feature the same wifi component and they might have it on their US based site.

dell india support is hopeless.

My sister needs to use some old softwares which are not supported by 64 bit Win 7.
Win 7 64 bit has good backward compatibility for 32 bit softwares but certain softwares don't run on Win 7 64bit.

Thanks for the advice. Will contact https://twitter.com/#!/dellcares

Doesnt Windows 7 comes with preloaded drivers.I installed Windows 7 32 bit on my HP laptop, no drivers needed at all!

even Windows 7 can struggle with Wi-Fi drivers from some obscure companies. my experience was opposite. i found 32bit drivers. was hard to find 64bit drivers.

If hardware vendors use components / devices of obscure companies it should be their duty to make those drivers available.Some people need to use legacy software for some purpose which do not run on 64 bit OS. Even if the software runs it crashes frequently due to dependencies on certain system files.

well frankly speaking most companies would not support any other operating system other than the one that was bundled with the laptop itself. and Dell does highlight very clearly that they OS on their machine would be 64bit in nature. it has been like that for a long time now.