Taking the Windows 7 64 Bit Plunge

If you aren’t interested in technical stuff, skip the first two or three paragraphs below…

It has been many many months since we built our machines at home.  Tarkheena and I both build new machines every couple of years.  On this last build, we installed Win XP Pro on our two main gaming machines.  I foolishly didn’t anticipate how XP Pro wouldn’t play as nice with the XP Home machines on the network and set myself up for a permission-setting fiasco.  Luckily, I built a server a couple of years ago and installed Windows Home Server on it.  This serves as a file and print server, media server, as well as a backup device.  I won’t go into too much detail at this time, as that isn’t the purpose of this blog.  Suffice to say that the WHS has saved my bacon a couple of times.

As XP machines tend to do, performance degraded over time, as the registry slowly gave up it’s integrity to multiple installs and uninstalls.  So we decided to make the leap to Windows 7.  Since we both have machines that support a larger amount of addressable memory, we also decided to make the leap to 64-bit.  For the uninitiated among us, 32 bit Windows capped your memory at 4 GB, and it really didn’t quite make use of much over 2GB of user space.  Windows 7 64-bit (Ultimate, Professional, or Enterprise) will address up to 192 GB of physical memory.  Obviously much more than today’s motherboards will support.  Needless to say, the more headroom your applications have in memory, the better they are going to run.  This is because accessing the physical disk is one of the slowest processes in your computer and so if that can all happen at once, and up-front, the machine will do much better.

Windows 7 seems to be a little less of the pig, as well.  That is to say that it seems to run better on the same machine than Windows XP did.  This is a remarkable turn-around in Microsoft’s practices where previously each new OS was intended to take advantage of new as-yet-unavailable pieces of hardware.  In other words, products were designed to eat processor clock cycles so their friends at Intel could sell you a new computer.

As a discalimer, I should mention that I didn’t take advantage of the migration tools that MS offers, because I wasn’t comfortable with how they work and I don’t like to be my own guinea pig.  It’s always much easier to do with someone else’s data and asking them “Are you SURE you want me to try that?”  ”Well OK, then.”  Having Windows Home Server with a complete backup of the network does add a level of comfort to the process though.  And I’m glad I had it.

Tark and I decided to just add a new hard drive to each machine (you can never have too much storage) and change that to the primary partition and install the new Win 7 there.  That way we would have all of our data on the old drive, and a fresh shiny new Windows 7 installation on the new one.  In the interim, if anything catastrophic happened, I could always switch the boot order and get back to status quo.  Nothing bad happened, but there are some consequences to migrating already-installed games from XP to 7.

First of all- since Vista, Windows has changed the way that it stores user data.  I won’t get too technical but suffice to say that there is more to the change than renaming your “My Documents” folder “Documents.”  This causes difficulty if you try to migrate games from one platform to the other, because saved data, patch data, etc., might not be where the program expects to find it any more.  Or more accurately it’s not in the NEW place Windows is looking for it.  This happed for us with both WoW and Torchlight, while the remainder of my Steam games were perfectly happy with me doing a new Steam install on the new drive and copying all of the game files over.  For the Torchlight saved games I had to find where it used to store them, and then it was a simple copy and paste to the new location.  Not bad but not something every gamer is going to be comfortable doing.  When I moved the famously portable WoW directory to the new location it really messed with my Curse installation.  It mostly ran fine once I upgraded to Curse Client 4.0, until the mini patch Monday night.

On both machines, once WoW started to patch, it seemed to be confused about where it was in the patch process and it seemed to basically repatch everything from v 3.0.  While annoying and time-wasting, this was hardly a deal breaker.  On my machine, right-clicking on the patcher and choosing to “Run as Administrator” cut down a little on UAC asking me if I was sure so often.  Yes, I’m sure, Dammit!  On Tarks’ machine, however, there was a glitch.  Somehow one of the important WoW files got deleted.  WoW objected at the end of each patch.  Having the server backup I was able to find and reinstall the missing file and after that and a lot of patching WoW seemed happy.  It’s pretty much run better than it did on XP since.

So here is my recommendation to you guys.  If you are technically savvy and feel comfortable moving things around in your system, you can do what I did.  For two computers I spent the better part of a day messing with stuff, reinstalling certain apps, toying with the interface.  I lost some things that I can’t find the install disks for, but that was going to happen no matter what I decided on a new OS.  If you aren’t as savvy, You may want to use the Windows migration tool, do a migration and reinstall all of your games from disks.  To do that you will need to use an external hard drive, so that may be an additional expense for you. You can probably check the game’s forums right now and get good information about migrating since so many people are doing it at the moment.

Now that it’s mostly done (I still have one more machine to migrate) I have to say that I’m pretty thrilled with Win 7 so far.  It’s lighter and faster, and the interface is a step ahead of XP for sure.  The networking is so much simpler it isn’e even close.  And I love being able to use all of my physical memory.  I’m giving it a “thumbs up” as long as you follow the caveats above.  I’d love to hear what your experiences have been like!

-Genda