Changing over from XP to 7

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Skitter

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The main reason I'm putting this off is the thought of having to reinstall everything turns my blood to ice :( The other reason is that the machine I'm on has 4 gigs of RAM and since my version of XP only supports 2.7, 1.3 gigs are going to waste.

Question 1: I'm on a Mac. Is installing Windows 7 through Bootcamp exactly the same process as installing XP?

Q 2: Do all XP programs work on 7?

Q 3: There seems to be a 64 and a 86 bit version of 7. What's the difference between these two?
 
You will be very happy with win7 :)
To date i havent found any software not compatible with windows 7, i heard some old accounting software has issues.
The difference between 32 and 64bit is:
32bit supports a total of 4gb of system memory combined, like system and 3d memory both count towards the ''4gb cap''
64bit supports up to 192gb, talking under correction but its in that region.
Bare in mind there are a couple variants like home, home premium, professional and Ultimate and each has a different ram limit, the least is 8gb for home i think.
 
Q1: I have no personal experience, but the Win7 install is even easier than the XP install so I'd asume the answer to be "yes". Google is yer friend.
Q2: Anything that runs on XP should run on Win7 without any issues, and this has been my experience so far. If you encounter a program that gives you problems, either set it to XP compatibility or download VMware Player, create an XP virtual machine, and run your app in the VM. If you buy the Professional version of Win7 you also get the ability to use the Microsoft Virtual PC, which gives you a free virtual install of XP with no additional license required.
Q3: 32-bit OSes are limited to a maximum of 4GB of memory, whereas 64-bit OSes can theoretically address up to billion of GB of RAM. Win7 64-bit limits you to 192GB.

Go for the Win7 64-bit upgrade, you will really notice the difference. Just make very sure that your CPU is 64-bit before you take the plunge.
 
Question, (and I asked this about Vista)

Unless your machine is Brand New and souped up to the sprocket, what avantage does 7 have over XP?

Sure the GUI is flash (and frankly I'm not a great fan of flash), but it seems that my wife's windows 7 laptop with pretty much double the vooma of my lil ol Toshiba takes just as long (if not longer) to perform basic functions.

Granted my Toshiba is optimised for performance with all the resource sapping nonsense switched off.

Even my NFS games run better on the XP machine despite the Windows 7 Machine having a dedicated GPU.
 
1. Yes, might be easier as pointed out already
2. Yes. For all the apps giving you hassles there is XP mode in Windows 7
3. 64-bit has a much higher RAM limit and some software has been shown to run faster on the 64-bit version of Windows 7.

All Macs built in 2007 and later can safely use the 64-bit version. There really is no reason to get the x86 one.
 
Well, let me be the first to tell you. I did it.

Not exactly over the moon with Windows 7, it's more of the same,fancy new buttons and stuff, but my memory usage is alot. Doing nothing much really.

No programs are incompatible (so far) but I hve had to redownload the 64bit versions (d'uh, that's why i installed the damn OS) using the x64 version. Ultimate.

Boots quicker than XP for sure, also programs run quicker. AShampoo Burning Studio is the only program that has given me grief. So i don't use it anymore :p

Totally different feel to it. Must say, I prefer the look of Mac Os right now and Ubuntu. If only I knew how to operate those fully I'd be a huge fan of those.

Edit : Actually, let me be 100% honest here, I don't like Windows 7. My CPU is constantly over 20% and memory used is 1.41GB. Doing what? F knows. Running M$ rubbish in the background indexing all my files for the 'instant search' feature that i use once in a blue moon!!
 
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Skitter said:
The main reason I'm putting this off is the thought of having to reinstall everything turns my blood to ice :( The other reason is that the machine I'm on has 4 gigs of RAM and since my version of XP only supports 2.7, 1.3 gigs are going to waste.

Question 1: I'm on a Mac. Is installing Windows 7 through Bootcamp exactly the same process as installing XP?

Q 2: Do all XP programs work on 7?

Q 3: There seems to be a 64 and a 86 bit version of 7. What's the difference between these two?
Click to expand...

I didn't feel like reinstalling all my Applications so I did an in place upgrade of XP to Vista and then Vista to Win7 on a MacBook (besides, I just wanted to see if it could be done...)

Couple of words of advice:

1. Follow the instructions provided by Apple on how to do the upgrade + google it - there are a couple of good guides out there
2. Print out all the instructions beforehand
3. I ran ALL updates between each installation
4. Unplug computer from Internet; uninstall AntiVirus Software before the in-place upgrade; re-install Antivirus once ugrade complete; plug back in; run all updates.

Voila - everything works lovely.
 
AnandTech just recently did an article on using a Mac laptop as a dedicated Windows 7 computer, and it was an interesting read. Anyway, to the poster who wondered why 7 has such a high ram usage even at idle, it's because it was designed that way. 7 caches frequently used applications to ram, so that when you start them, it starts faster. XP had a totally different memory model, which was based on keeping usage as low as possible.
 
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Esquire has win7 Pro 64bit for R979 - is DSP so only for 1 PC - Was the best price i found when looking around.
As mentioned above with Pro version you can download Windows Virtual PC which lets you run a program in XP if it won't run on win7.

I only had 1 program i needed to run in XP virtual mode & that was only needed to be done that way because it was a cracked version of a program.
(I own the program but it saves me lugging a dongle around by using the cracked version on my laptop)
 
Tun@ said:
DSP so only for 1 PC
Click to expand...

Not the only problem: far as I know it can only be activated once and will fail validation if too much hardware changes (e.g. mobo) so if you need to reinstall/upgrade gonna have to beg MS to activate again.
 
stevenv said:
Not the only problem: far as I know it can only be activated once and will fail validation if too much hardware changes (e.g. mobo) so if you need to reinstall/upgrade gonna have to beg MS to activate again.
Click to expand...

Not really you just need to phone them and bam you do it over the phone, it will not activate online as your hardware has changed but a simple phone call and selecting this is only installed on one pc will do the trick.
 
stevenv said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prefetcher

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista_I/O_technologies#SuperFetch*

* References Vista but still applicable to 7. Bottom line is that free memory is useless and is better filled with the images of applications you frequently use so that they do not have to be fetched from the slower disk subsystem before being loaded into memory.
Click to expand...

I hear you, XP was still faster though, and just felt way more stable. Fetching images perhaps isn't what I want my PC to do with my extra memory.

Still trying to get used to 7 though... Won't give up just yet.
 
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