Gaming Windows XP to 7 Question(s)

[Raiser]

Hey guys,

I've been thinking about upgrading to Windows 7, but I remember reading that you can't jump straight from XP to 7.
Has that changed at all? If so, can someone provide some steps for me?

Does the Windows 7 upgrade process include and sort of automated backup of files? I read, once again, "somewhere" that your files are put into a folder that you can access after the installation of 7 is complete.

And finally, does pirating Windows 7 include any sort of security risks?
Does it still include ALL the updates that retail versions get?

Thanks guys (and gals)!

 

[jefffisher]

upgrading usually isnt the best option it leaves things weird but i'm pretty sure it will work.

aslong as you don't format during installation nothing will be deleted maybe instead of upgrading consider dual booting i do suggest that for a good reason if you are currently on windows xp chances are your computer is rather oldish 7 isnt going to run great on it and you'll want to go back to xp soon.

pirating windows 7 is completely golden for now no worries but what the future may bring no one knows.

 

[Skyline969]

Yeah, you can't do an upgrade install from XP to 7. I'd recommend shrinking your partition so you have 20+ gigs free, making a new partition, then installing 7 to that partition, then grabbing your data from the old partition and then deleting said partition, finally expanding your 7 partition to the unallocated space. Y'know, if you don't have an external hard drive to back up your stuff before blowing it all away and starting clean.

 

[Deleted User]

Don't upgrade. If you're only upgrading for the Eye Candy, it's worth it. If you want more productivity, it isn't.

 

[Raiser]

upgrading usually isnt the best option it leaves things weird but i'm pretty sure it will work.

aslong as you don't format during installation nothing will be deleted maybe instead of upgrading consider dual booting i do suggest that for a good reason if you are currently on windows xp chances are your computer is rather oldish 7 isnt going to run great on it and you'll want to go back to xp soon.

pirating windows 7 is completely golden for now no worries but what the future may bring no one knows.
What do you mean "weird"?
Haha it seems that way, but I recently upgraded pretty much everything from the motherboard to harddrive to fan to CPU to GPU. (;

Yeah, you can't do an upgrade install from XP to 7. I'd recommend shrinking your partition so you have 20+ gigs free, making a new partition, then installing 7 to that partition, then grabbing your data from the old partition and then deleting said partition, finally expanding your 7 partition to the unallocated space. Y'know, if you don't have an external hard drive to back up your stuff before blowing it all away and starting clean.
Could I ask if you could list the steps for me in regards to your entire second sentence? I'm not familiar with dealing with partitions.
As of right now, I have 85GB free of 465GB on a single partition.

You can transfer files between partitions? I didn't know that.

QUOTE(JetKun @ Aug 18 2010, 12:06 AM)

Don't upgrade. If you're only upgrading for the Eye Candy, it's worth it. If you want more productivity, it isn't.

Yeah, I'm pretty much doing it for the eye-candy, and the supposed better multi-monitor support as I've been told that XP has terrible support for it.
AND for the extra RAM. Since XP can only handle up to.. 3.3ishGB of RAM? So yeah.

Thanks everyone!

EDIT: Oh, and is this the latest?
Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate Retail(Final) x86 (32 bit) and x64 (64 bit)

EDIT2: Sorry again. What's the difference between x86 (32bit) and x64 (64bit)?

 

[Skyline969]

Hoo boy... here we go.

1. Open up Disk Management.
2. Right click on your partition, and choose Shrink Volume (or similar).
3. Shrink it by 20GB or so (30 preferred).
4. Insert the Windows 7 disc and reboot.
5. Proceed with installation until it asks you where to install. Choose the unallocated space and choose to format it to NTFS.
6. Proceed with installation. Hell, this should even have you working with a dual-boot so far.
7. Get Windows 7 all prepared to your liking (antivirus, whatever).
8. Go to Computer (in 7) and choose your other partition (it'll show up like it's another hard drive in your computer), then find your files and copy them over.
9. You can go into Disk Management in Windows 7 and shrink your old partition (the same way you shrunk it before) as needed to make room for your stuff. You can also expand your Windows 7 partition by right clicking on it and choosing to expand it (or something to that effect).
10. Once you have all the files you want from the old partition, you can open Disk Management again and right-click the old partition and delete it, then expand your Windows 7 partition to use all of the unallocated space created from the deletion of the old partition.
11. Enjoy Windows 7.

Now, this is off the top of my head, not reading any guide or anything. If someone else wants to confirm this (I can easily makes mistakes at 2:12 AM when I'm tired as hell), that'd be great.

 

[Thoob]

No. This won't work. You are unable to expand partitions into space on the left of that partition in Windows.

 

[Raiser]

Hoo boy... here we go.

1. Open up Disk Management.
2. Right click on your partition, and choose Shrink Volume (or similar).
3. Shrink it by 20GB or so (30 preferred).
4. Insert the Windows 7 disc and reboot.
5. Proceed with installation until it asks you where to install. Choose the unallocated space and choose to format it to NTFS.
6. Proceed with installation. Hell, this should even have you working with a dual-boot so far.
7. Get Windows 7 all prepared to your liking (antivirus, whatever).
8. Go to Computer (in 7) and choose your other partition (it'll show up like it's another hard drive in your computer), then find your files and copy them over.
9. You can go into Disk Management in Windows 7 and shrink your old partition (the same way you shrunk it before) as needed to make room for your stuff. You can also expand your Windows 7 partition by right clicking on it and choosing to expand it (or something to that effect).
10. Once you have all the files you want from the old partition, you can open Disk Management again and right-click the old partition and delete it, then expand your Windows 7 partition to use all of the unallocated space created from the deletion of the old partition.
11. Enjoy Windows 7.

Now, this is off the top of my head, not reading any guide or anything. If someone else wants to confirm this (I can easily makes mistakes at 2:12 AM when I'm tired as hell), that'd be great.

Haha thanks very much for this.
I actually don't have any "unallocated space" on my partition. o.o
This isn't my screen, but the options in the menu are similar except "Mark partition as Active" is grayed out as well:

Spoiler

Do I use something like Partition Magic?

 

[FAST6191]

Multiple monitors I have done on XP very well for several years now. It helps to add something like ultramon but stock works quite well (until my motherboard messed things up I was rocking 4 monitors quite happily).

Also with regards to ram 32 bit windows 7 is still stuck with the 32 bit limit (no PAE) and so the 4 gig limit. edit: X64 uses the 64bit instructions that modern processors have while 32 bit runs on 32 bit machines or the 32bit mode of the processors. 64 bit allows for bigger instructions and theoretically more performance from applications but they have to be written/compiled for it so you might not notice much unless you are into your video encoding, huge databases or one of about 5 games that can make real use of it. You will probably see a bigger performance boost if you upgraded your hard drive to a fast one or a RAID that aims for speed increases.

Instead of deleting and moving partitions how about changing where the directories you want happen to sit (not to mention leaving it as XP version of NTFS makes like easier when using recovery tools and operating systems that do not have MS supported versions of NTFS). http://www.w7forums.com/change-location-my...older-t338.html
The bonus with this method is when the installation gets hosed up you can just install it again and not have to fiddle about and shuffle data across drives first.

Changing partitions can be done on many things but I usually use a linux liveCD that has something like gparted on it (doing it on a live/active disc does not sit well with me). Many distributions have it from the most basic ones to the top line distributions so if you already have one of them try that or you can just run it from the live CD it has on site: http://gparted.sourceforge.net/livecd.php

Guide to partition resizing:
http://gparted.sourceforge.net/larry/resize/resizing.htm

 

[Originality]

Worth mentioning: if you try and install Windows 7 over XP ignoring the whole "partitioning" thing, your version of XP will be stored in a folder called "Windows.old", whilst 7 will be stored in the usual "Windows" folder. After that all you have to do is open up Windows.old and copy anything you need out of it before deleting it.

The only problem with this method is how messy it becomes on the HDD (placing Windows half way up the HDD is worse than at the very edge). Even so, it's nothing a good defragging shouldn't fix.

 

[Cermage]

Worth mentioning: if you try and install Windows 7 over XP ignoring the whole "partitioning" thing, your version of XP will be stored in a folder called "Windows.old", whilst 7 will be stored in the usual "Windows" folder. After that all you have to do is open up Windows.old and copy anything you need out of it before deleting it.

The only problem with this method is how messy it becomes on the HDD (placing Windows half way up the HDD is worse than at the very edge). Even so, it's nothing a good defragging shouldn't fix.

this. any old windows installs, during the 7 install, the installer will backup most things (documents desktop e.t.c) from memory. also win7 has prescheduled defragging so it'll run regardless of being setup or not.

 

[Raiser]

Worth mentioning: if you try and install Windows 7 over XP ignoring the whole "partitioning" thing, your version of XP will be stored in a folder called "Windows.old", whilst 7 will be stored in the usual "Windows" folder. After that all you have to do is open up Windows.old and copy anything you need out of it before deleting it.

The only problem with this method is how messy it becomes on the HDD (placing Windows half way up the HDD is worse than at the very edge). Even so, it's nothing a good defragging shouldn't fix.

EDIT after Cermage's post:
Is this confirmed?
In Skyline's post, he says that you cannot upgrade from XP to 7. Unless this is considered as a clean installation with the XP files being "transferred" to the new OS.

Will the defragging fix it completely? A fucked up HDD is the last thing I want. o.o
During the installation, do you choose "Upgrade" or "Custom"? It says that Custom doesn't keep your files, but people say Upgrade is a problem with XP.

Oh ALSO, is there some kind of test as to if my hardware can install the x64 version of Windows 7? As far as I know, it all depends on the CPU?

 

[Cermage]

depending on the age, at most you'll see some slowdowns if a hard drive isn't defragged. the only times you should be worrying is if you hear clicking from your pc or you can boot into windows lol. there is a program called HDTune that will check your harddrive's "health" and performance and whatnot. i use it regularly to make sure my backup drives are running along okay

re: 64bit cpu. generally most recent cpu's have the 64bit instruction set. talking mid to later end of the single core era here (so about 7 years ago). easiest way to tell is to google your processor name/use speccy and it should show either the 64bit specification (usually x64, along with a bunch of other things like SSE1, SSE2, MMX e.t.c)

 

[Raiser]

depending on the age, at most you'll see some slowdowns if a hard drive isn't defragged. the only times you should be worrying is if you hear clicking from your pc or you can boot into windows lol. there is a program called HDTune that will check your harddrive's "health" and performance and whatnot. i use it regularly to make sure my backup drives are running along okay

re: 64bit cpu. generally most recent cpu's have the 64bit instruction set. talking mid to later end of the single core era here (so about 7 years ago). easiest way to tell is to google your processor name/use speccy and it should show either the 64bit specification (usually x64, along with a bunch of other things like SSE1, SSE2, MMX e.t.c)

I defrag every so often, so I should be alright.

Intel Core 2 Duo E7400:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel....22_.2845_nm.29

I'm clear for x64?

 

[Cermage]

# All models support: MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4.1, Enhanced Intel SpeedStep Technology (EIST), Intel 64, XD bit (an NX bit implementation), iAMT2 (Intel Active Management)

easily.

 

[Raiser]

Alright, I have a 30GB partition set up (finally).

So if I run the Windows 7 disc, it should reboot and then I'd just specify the new partition (NTFS) and install it there?

I assume that's it. o.o

Oh and can someone explain to me what the loaders are (for)?

EDIT: Having trouble with the installation.
Right after I click Install, I get an error message saying that I'm missing required CD/DVD drivers.

I Googled and found that a decent number of people have encountered this, but haven't found a clear solution yet.
All I can find out of my system specs is: "ATAPI DVD DD 2X16X4X16"

Can't find any drivers for that. ._.
I'm trying a slower disc burn this time, and hopefully.. it does something.

 

[Originality]

Just so you know, the "2X16X4X16X" refers to the CD/DVD read/write speeds, not the actual model number. I think it's telling you that it doesn't actually know what your DVD drive is so it's just using generic drivers. "ATAPI" is the interface and I think "DD" is short for Disc Drive.

 

[Raiser]

Just so you know, the "2X16X4X16X" refers to the CD/DVD read/write speeds, not the actual model number. I think it's telling you that it doesn't actually know what your DVD drive is so it's just using generic drivers. "ATAPI" is the interface and I think "DD" is short for Disc Drive.

Ahh I see, thanks for the information!

A slower burn did the trick and the OS installation went smoothly!
Now I'm just trying to move my XP partitioned files over without having to resize the partitions over and over.

Also, I remember that when I first installed XP, I was notified saying that I had 30 days left to activate or whatever.
I haven't dealt with any loader business yet, but there have been no such notifications yet. o.o

 

[shamiko_]

use a loader ie win7 extreme (google if needed) or remove WAT

 

[seahorsepip]

only use th 1.9.1 daz loader it is the newest working version

removge wat is not suggested since some kind of fix fro microsoft against it that gives pcs watermarks...