win 32 to vista 64

[Robert Bobson]

Has anyone upgraded from windows XP (32) to vista 64?

Just wondering how it went - problems, file transfer, etc?

[Shawn McCalip]

I went from XP Home to Vista Ultimate 64-bit on my laptop. What I did was buy a whole new hard drive for my laptop. the old one was getting a bit crowded, and as a bonus, if anything went wrong with the transition to Vista, I had a perfectly good hard drive with XP that I could replace easily. All in all, the upgrade went without a hitch. If you're upgrading on an existing machine, I do recommend going through and downloading ALL the Vista drivers you can and then save those on a CD or a thumb-drive so you can install them manually when you get Vista installed. On my laptop, Vista didn't recognize much of anything, and I had to manually install the drivers for all the hardware, including video, network, wireless adapter, and sound board.

I installed all my software without problems and have so far had a much more stable experience than I did with XP. Just do your homework beforehand and you'll be OK. Be mindful that Vista does uses MORE system resources than XP. If you're doing a lot of editing or After Effects work, you would be wise to max out your RAM- or have at the very least 2GB. 3 or 4 GB is better if your Motherboard can take it.

Hope this helps, and good luck!

[Robert Bobson]

Thanks for all the info!

[Jeff Mack]

Just make sure you do as suggested above. CLONE your system before you change because I am sure you wil not like Vista anything!

Jeff

[Pete Bauer]

Originally Posted by Jeff Mack

Just make sure you do as suggested above. CLONE your system before you change because I am sure you wil not like Vista anything!
Jeff

Good advice to clone; overstated opinion on Vista x64.

It is always wise to have restore points and a clone of a good config.

I recently set up a dual-boot, increasing RAM from 4GB to 8GB, with Vista x64 SP1 and CS4 Master Collection. So far, rock stable and common tasks are perceptibly faster than the same system booted into XP 32 with CS3. Haven't yet done apples-to-apples speed tests for video editing tasks but the stability and ease with which one can run multiple apps under 64 bit is very welcome. Unless and until I run into a Vista-caused problem, I'm really happy with x64.

If you're doing a Win XP to Vista x64 upgrade, I can't vouch for the upgrade process. Conventional wisdom is to do clean installs but if you've cloned there should be no real concern with trying an upgrade. Let us know how it goes.