I have 32 bit :-(

So I have windows vista 32 bit but I do have the upgrade to widows 7 32 bit for the PC as well. Is widows 7 32 bit good enough for a gaming computer. I have a radeon 7970 with an i5 Ivy bridge.

If you have 4 or more gigs of ram, then go 64 bit, if not, stay with 32 bit. 32 bit will fine. If you have your windows 7 cd, you can try to up windows to 64 bit

I believe I have 8 gigs... can I upgrade vista 32 bit to windows 7 64 bit?

Upgrade? No, fresh install? Yes. Depends if your W7 disc is a upgrade only disc.

My step dad had a spare vista program with the windows 7 32 bit upgrade so I basicly got this for free which is why idk what to do. 

PAE should be good enough if you have more than 4GB of RAM.

Win Vista and Win7 will automaticaly use PAE but MS have set an artificial 4GB limit. So your your running 4GB you can use it all but nothing over 4GB even with PAE enabled. I'm not sure why MS have gone down this route. PAE could have done well for most users for some year to come. Only if you know that a program will use more than 4GB of ram would you need a full 64bit OS. I run Linux as well as Windows and for most systems I run 32bit with PAE. It just works better most of the time. There are times when you need 64bit but for most people for most of the time 32bit with PAE would be just fine...