At work, there are some machines that might be upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 7. They are all 32-bit systems, with 2 to 4 GB RAM (for now on I'll talk only about 32-bit machines and OSes).
I'm used to working with a computer that has 4GB RAM, running Windows XP Professional, and it only uses about 700 MB RAM, leaving plenty of memory to work with. I've heard that Windows 7 is based on XP and also that it is more efficient than Vista (which is not a difficult thing). I don't have much experience with Windows 7 so I don't really know how it will perform under the same hardware.
Leaving alone that XP will not have updates beyond 2014 (the machines are suppoused to be in a LAN with some protection), do you think it is a good idea to upgrade to Windows 7?
These are development machines - some of them have legacy development tools that are needed for old projects. Will Windows 7 be compatible with these, either directly or via compatibility mode?