WinXP 64-bit Upgrade

[Brandon Strader]

Hi

If I upgrade my XP to 64-bit, do I need to reinstall everything? Cause I have like 150gb worth of software I don't wanna reinstall... but I NEED the extra RAM, as you may have guessed

[djpretzel]

You can't upgrade at all, it's a fresh install, period. Not just applications, the whole OS, AFAIK.

As we were telling zircon in #ocremix today, better to move to Win7 x64, which is more mainstream in terms of support at this point.

[Kidd Cabbage]

Agreed. There is really no point to staying with XP anymore.

[Brandon Strader]

My Alesis io|26 firewire doesn't have Win 7 support though, and trying to run it on that causes audio drop-outs. I tried.

So another 6+ hours of installing.... sigh.

By the way djp, Alesis disagrees with you, haha. A support worker for them told me "With Windows 7, it will likely be 6 months to a year before the DJ and/or Recording industries as a whole will be adopting and recommending Windows 7 as a preferred platform for any professional application."

[Arcana]

"With Windows 7, it will likely be 6 months to a year before the DJ and/or Recording industries as a whole will be adopting and recommending Windows 7 as a preferred platform for any professional application."

Doesn't mean that they don't support Windows 7, just means that the industry as a whole moves slow as a dog.

The Windows 7 64-bit version is considered more widespread than the 32-bit version overall; probably not more widespread than Windows XP, but Win7 has seen fast adoption rates, so the momentum is there.

[Brandon Strader]

I'd love to use Windows 7, I think it is very pretty. But i'd have to buy a compatible recording interface to replace the Alesis io|26 firewire, and that would be expensive and I'd have to do a lot of research.

[dannthr]

I happily used Windows XP x64 for my farm machine for years before switching to Windows 7 x64. The reason for the switch was that ultimately, people don't support the Windows XP 64bit platform as much as they support Windows 7 64bit. It's just going to be easier to find hardware drivers for Win 7 x64 over Win XP x64.

No trouble switching though and my new farm machine gets incredible performance.

[CC Ricers]

Windows XP x64 would've been the ideal Windows 3 years ago, and I was disappointed that support dropped quickly. It's all likely because Microsoft was pushing people to get Vista instead