@banjopicks first of all, welcome to the forum 
You may not need to. You mentioned the laptop is 32bit - now that can mean you are running a 32 bit version of Windows; however, if the laptop is perchance dual-core, you can indeed install a 64bit OS. You could use Windows, or Linux of course (cheaper and in my opinion better).
The big question, of course, is: is your laptop dual-core?