Windows 7 Upgrade Confusion

Read an article from ComputerWorld by Gregg Keizer about some confusion with upgrading to Windows 7. Evidently a company called Digital River was offering discounted downloadable upgrades to students for Windows Version 7. 100's of customers complained that they were receiving an error message when trying to install the upgrade. According to Digital River and Microsoft, the problem occurs when students purchased a 64 bit version of Windows 7 to download onto their 32 bit existing versions of either Vista or Windows XP. I have to admit, I probably would make the same mistake and was curious about the difference between 32 bit and 64 bit. So I typed into Google (gotta love that!) "Difference Between 32 bit and 64 bit Windows". Amazingly an article from Microsoft popped up and I read all about it! Evidently some 32 bit computers are capable of running 64 bit but some are not able to. I decided to check out my own laptop. Here were the instructions: Open your Control Panel (by clicking first on the Start button) and go into Systems Maintenance. Click on Performance Information and Tools. View and Print Details. In the System Section you can read if you are running 32 or 64 bit and whether your computer even has the capability of running 64 bit. Be sure to check it out before downloading your upgrade. Digital River mentioned they would give refunds so if you ran into this problem read the article - it gives instructions on how to get that refund.