By Raja
We show you how to upgrade to a 64-bit operating system for free. But more importantly, we tell you who should and who shouldn’t make the switch.
While 64-bit computers are commonplace today, 64-bit operating systems are only just becoming mainstream. Your 32-bit operating system could also be limiting performance if your PC has a 64-bit CPU, which it probably does. A 64-bit operating system offers several key advantages over its 32-bit counterpart. First and foremost is the ability to take advantage of more than 4 GB of memory. A 32-bit operating system is inherently limited to 4,096 MB of memory, meaning after video memory and other peripheral memory, your computer may only be able to use 3 GB of RAM or less. Because of this 4,096 MB limit, files larger than this can take longer to load because they are constantly called from the hard drive instead of the much faster page file memory or RAM. A 64-bit operating system, on the other hand, can boost this limit to 16,000 petabytes (although, in common practice, your software generally limits it to 128 GB).
A 64-bit operating system can also give significant performance increases when running 64-bit versions of software. Some of the largest gains come in very computationally-intensive tasks that deal with high-precision numbers (like 3D rendering and physics simulations). Things like data encryption can run up to five times faster in a 64-bit environment compared to the same system with a 32-bit operating system. You probably don’t do that type of computing, but more popular programs also see performance increases including Photoshop, many compression programs (like 7zip), and video codecs. Even games perform better on a 64-bit system because it gives them access to more than 2 GB of memory and greatly increases stability thanks to the 64-bit operating system’s added precision.
There are also a few downsides to upgrading to a 64-bit operating system. For example, running 32-bit programs in a 64-bit environment can be problematic. Occasionally, 32-bit programs may have trouble running or will not even run at all. Fortunately, this is an issue very rarely experienced now that 64-bit systems have become so mainstream. However, running 32-bit programs on a 64-bit operating system can use a fair bit more RAM, so if you have a computer with just 2 GB or less of RAM, it's probably better for you to stick with a 32-bit operating system.
If you think a 64-bit operating system sounds appealing to you, there’s a way to upgrade both Windows Vista and Windows 7 to 64-bits for free.
It was not until just recently that manufacturers started shipping computers with 64-bit versions of Windows. Prior to that, a 32-bit CPU was the default. Even systems that absolutely should have a 64-bit operating system (such as those with 4 GB of RAM or more) are still being bundled with 32-bit versions of Windows in some cases. Many of the ultralight, full-size laptops, like some versions of Acer's Timeline series, MSI's X-Slim, and Lenovo's U-series, still ship with 32-bit Windows 7. Of course, these are not the only manufacturers guilty of this. Virtually every manufacturer has released a 64-bit capable system with a 32-bit operating system at some point.
Fortunately, the big manufacturers are starting to see the error in their ways and are making sure to bundle 64-bit operating systems with the systems that need it or will benefit from it. Dell was one of the first, along with HP. Even Sony has a full lineup of systems with 64-bit operating systems. However, if you happened to buy your computer before this wonderful revolution took place, you do not have to be stuck with that 32-bit OS.
As it turns out, 32-bit keys are compatible with the 64-bit version of the operating system as well. As long as the product level is consistent, bit versions do not matter. For example, if you have 32-bit Windows 7 Home Premium, that key will work with the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium. Obviously, it goes without saying that a Home Premium key will not mix with Home Basic or Ultimate and, of course, a Vista key will not work with Windows 7 and vice versa. One exception to the rule is that Windows XP keys are not interchangeable between bit versions.
The process to upgrade to a 64-bit OS does require a fair bit of work. You have to research your hardware for drivers and reformat your hard drive. This may sound daunting, but we will walk you through the most common method step by step.
The most important step to upgrading your operating system is preparation. The first thing to do is make sure that your CPU is a 64-bit device. The easiest way to do this is with a
program called CPU-Z. Running it will give you comprehensive information about your CPU, including supported instruction sets. If it supports EM64 (or similar variant) for Intel CPUs or AMD64 for AMD CPUs, you have a 64-bit compatible system.
Next you will want to find your Windows CD Key, usually found on a sticker located somewhere on your computer tower or the bottom of your laptop or on the CD box itself. If you cannot find it, there is a very useful
program called Magic Jelly Bean that will locate your product key. Magic Jelly Bean will also be helpful if your system has pre-installed software, as it will give you the keys for those programs as well. Make sure to write down your keys and double check that you copied them down correctly.
The next big step is to make sure 64-bit drivers are available for your computer. The best place to look first is your manufacturer's Website. You might have to dig around a bit, but they will probably be available, and oftentimes, live chat support agents will be available to help you. If you cannot find 64-bit drivers for your model, you can still try to locate them through the individual parts manufacturers. However, this can be rather difficult as you need to be familiar with your computer's hardware. The main drivers you will want to find will be your chipset drivers (generally found on Intel or AMD's sites), your Ethernet and/or wireless drivers (though these are often installed automatically), your video drivers, and your audio drivers.
Since upgrading to a 64-bit operating system requires you to reformat your hard drive, you will want to backup all of your important data to a separate drive, ideally some sort of portable/removable storage device, just to prevent confusion during the formatting phase. It is also wise to make note of the total size and free space of your C drive, to make it easier to recognize later.
The last big hurdle in preparation is obtaining an install disk. Some manufacturers such as Dell and HP may be willing to work with you in providing a 64-bit re-installation DVD for just the price of the DVD plus shipping. Others, such as Acer, will sometimes put both a 32-bit and 64-bit recovery partition on your hard drive, giving you the choice when running their recovery option. Short from those methods, your only other option is to get an installation DVD yourself. There is always the option to find one via Bit Torrent, but it is especially not recommended because a virus can easily be injected into the installation DVD or the image can be "cracked," forcing you to run an illegal version of the software. Your best bet is to ask friends and colleagues or perhaps the IT guys at the office. Odds are that you know someone who has a DVD you can borrow.
If you have recently upgraded from Vista to Windows 7, the upgrade disk you received has both 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows on it, so you can use the first upgrading method we describe on the next page. Retail versions of Windows 7 Full also include both bit versions.
If you have obtained your upgrade DVD from your manufacturer, it is probably best to follow its instructions. However, if you have a generic installer DVD from a friend or elsewhere, there are two methods for upgrading your system.
The safest method is to run the setup from within your currently installed version of Windows. This will allow you to not only check to make sure your system is truly 64-bit compatible, using the Windows Upgrade Advisor, but it will also let you know if your key is correct before erasing any data (some OEM keys can be picky about their installer DVDs).
To use this method, simply insert your new installer DVD. This guide will walk you through the steps for installing Windows 7, but Vista is nearly identical. A dialogue box may pop up, asking what you want to do with the DVD. Select "Run Setup.exe." If nothing happens after inserting the DVD, open My Computer and double click your DVD drive with the disk in it. That will initiate the Windows Installer.
From here, click Install Now. Do not worry—it will not actually start installing anything yet. In the next screen, you will be given the option to go online to download updates. It is recommended that you do this option, as it will help make your new installation more secure and look for compatible drivers. Feel free to uncheck the "I want to make Windows Installation better" box if you like. The installer will then proceed to download the updates and then prompt you with a license agreement. You have to agree or it will not let you install it.
You will now be faced with a grayed out Upgrade option and a Custom (Advanced) option. Select the Custom option. This will start the installer, which will copy all of your current Windows files to a folder called Windows.old. Your computer will reboot several times during this process, so do not be alarmed. It can take up to an hour or so, depending on the speed of your computer.
Once the installation is complete, you can setup your account and login information as well as regional settings. Once logged into Windows, you will want to install your drivers. It is generally best to restart between each driver installation, starting with your chipset drivers, then video drivers, Ethernet/wireless drivers, and lastly audio drivers.
The second method when upgrading is a complete clean install. This generally leaves you with a crisper and faster system compared to the first method and offers maximum hard drive space as well. However, a clean install is slightly more dangerous because it will reformat your hard drive, erasing all data you have not backed up to a separate drive.
To do this, start your computer with the installation DVD inserted. It should give you an option to press any key to boot from the CD/DVD-ROM. When you see this message, press any key. If this message does not appear, reboot your computer and press the Boot Menu key, which is generally F11, but can sometimes be F2 or F10 (it will say on the splash screen when your computer is starting up). The Boot Menu will give you a list of options from which to boot. Select CD/DVD-ROM and you should see the "Press any key" message.
It should boot into the Windows Installer, where you will select Install Now. Follow the prompts until you come to a screen with an Upgrade option and Custom (Advanced) option. Select the Custom option.
This will take you to a screen with a list of hard drives. Select the drive you want to reformat and install Windows. Then you will click the Reformat button (you may have to click the Advanced Options button depending which version of Windows you are installing). Be absolutely sure this is the correct drive before reformatting it, as all data on it will be erased permanently.
Now click Next and the installation process will begin. Once the installation is complete, you can setup your account and login information as well as regional settings. Once logged into Windows, you will want to install your drivers. It is generally best to restart between each driver installation, starting with your chipset drivers, then video drivers, Ethernet/wireless drivers, and lastly audio drivers.
All Bits Accounted For
Now that you have your drivers installed and everything working well, enjoy your new 64-bit system. If your computer came with 4 GB of RAM or more, you will notice that all of it not only shows up in your system information, but it is all accessible as well. Take advantage of your free performance boost and install some games or edit some detailed photographs on Photoshop. Install Daemon Tools and see what a blessing it is to be able to mount an entire 4 GB file entirely to memory.
The age of 64-bit computing is upon us and now you are part of it as well.
By Raja
Firefox on Windows 7 had been behaving...oddly. The app would simply stop working and exit to the desktop. Yet, parts of the Firefox kernel would remain in memory, making it impossible to restart the application without firing up Task Manager and manually killing the process. It happened a half dozen times a day. I was beginning to contemplate a browser change.
Then I saw a message in the Windows Action Center. But more about that shortly.
By most measures (sales figures, user satisfaction, OEM pickup) Windows 7 has been a major success for Microsoft. But no operating system is perfect, and you will encounter problems on occasion. The vast array of hardware, drivers, and applications available for Windows necessarily means that issues will inevitably crop up.
The good news: Windows 7 gives you a robust set of tools to track down problems you encounter. We’ll take a look at a number of those tools, and how they can help you in your problem solving.
Given the complexity of the modern PC, it’s easy to think that any issue you encounter is an OS issue. I once had a user contact me about a technical issue back in the Windows XP era. He raged at some length about how poorly Microsoft had designed Windows, and how Windows needed to do a better job of helping him troubleshoot his PC. His actual problem turned out to be a bad southbridge. His USB controller had apparently died, so the system never made it past the POST, locking on the USB enumeration phase. I’m not sure how Windows could have helped him with that particular problem. Anyway...
My point is that you need to have some basic understanding of the problem you’re encountering. On top of that, you need to keep a clear head and dispassionate attitude during the problem solving process. After you’re up and running again, feel free to swear blue clouds at the real culprit; it makes me feel better when I do.
However, Windows even helps with at least one fundamental hardware problem: finicky memory. Both Vista and Windows 7 shipped with a surprisingly robust memory diagnostic, included on the Windows setup DVD. It’s not as granular as something like Memtest86+, but will certainly tell you if you’re running into memory problems or if your Windows setup issues may be due to something other than RAM failures. You can run the Windows memory diagnostics tool by either booting from the setup DVD or by typing “mdsched.exe” in the Run window. It doesn’t actually run in Windows, so you’ll need to reboot after scheduling a test run.
When you’re running Windows, problems you encounter typically span a discrete set of categories:
- Hardware stability issues (not driver related). For example, extreme overclocking may introduce stability problems. Similarly, system overheating or insufficient power supply problems can crop up under heavy loads.
- Application compatibility or app bugs. These range from simple problems, like UI bugs, to more serious issues, such as memory leaks.
- Driver issues. The most common driver issues you will encounter are graphics driver instability, followed by sound driver problems.
- Windows bugs. That’s right, Windows actually has the occasional bug. Really.
- Integration problems. This is the most difficult problem to track down, and can be due to a host of different issues. After you’ve installed and uninstalled large numbers of applications and multiple different pieces of hardware, you may have multiple DLLs, Visual C++ redistributables, weird registry entries, driver traces, and incompletely-uninstalled applications. All can contribute to Windows stability problems or just make Windows perform more poorly than a clean installation.
With these thoughts in mind, let’s take a look at some of the tools available within Windows 7 to assist you in your detective work.
Assuming your installation of Windows is actually running, the place to begin your hunt for a solution is the Windows Action Center. You’ll typically first encounter the Action Center as a small flag with an alert icon in your system tray.
The Action Center is a one-stop shop for Windows notifications.
Just click on the flag, then click on “Open Action Center.”
The Action Center is really only a starting place.
The key area you’ll want to explore is under "maintenance." See those messages? Note in particular the one that reads “Address a problem with ATI Graphics Driver.”
At the time, I was running an early beta of the Radeon HD 5870 driver. Removing that and installing the shipping Catalyst 9.11 driver cured a number of stability issues with several games.
Now let’s revisit my problem with Firefox.
The third one down, "Address a problem with Skype extension for Firefox" is another key message. As I noted earlier, I’d been having substantial stability issues with Firefox 3.5. Firefox would crash mysteriously, but the core Firefox process would “stick” in memory. I’d have to bring up task manager and manually kill the Firefox process. After disabling the Skype extension, most of my Firefox problems miraculously cleared up.
The Action Center is useful, but sometimes it’s too much of a nag. That little flagged exclamation point pops up when Windows wants to check for updates, if you haven’t backed up the system, and other actions useful for average users, but less useful for power users. You can tweak Action Center to only pop up with messages you consider important.
Tweak the Windows Action Center to tell you only the warnings you think are necessary – or not at all, if that’s your preference.
The Action Center can get you started, particularly with driver or applications issues. But it’s possible that you’ll need to dig deeper.
If Action Center does pop up with a message that it’s found a problem, clicking on the problem itself will pop up a solutions window. If appropriate, you can have Windows itself try to find and fix the problem. In the case of my Skype extention for Firefox issue, the options were actually appropriate.
Windows 7 possible solutions are sometimes actually useful!
Windows will happily try to check for solutions for every perceived problem. If you look at the "Check for Solutions" control panel applet, it can seem a little daunting.
Wait, isn’t Windows 7 supposed to be more stable?
At first blush, this seems like I had a huge number of problems. Wasn’t Windows 7 supposed to be more stable?
In fact, it is. Many of those issues were reported shortly after I’d installed Windows 7 and associated applications, but before I’d updated all those apps. The problems reported with Outlook, for example, have disappeared since I updated Office.
One other option available under the Maintenance tab of the action center is a link labeled "View Reliability History." This brings up a screen that allows you to track system problems and frequency over time.
The Windows Reliability Monitor tracks system problems and frequency over time.
While "Check for Solutions" has improved over time, it’s still not perfect. There are times when you need to manually grab a new update or driver.
The reliability monitor doesn’t point out trends, but looking at system problems over time does allow you to interpolate trends on your own. Sometimes you may encounter seemingly disparate problems that actually have a common cause.
Recently, for example, I’ve been having an issue with the PC RPG
Dragon Age: Origins. The sound in the game would stop working. Okay, so maybe my sound drivers were behaving oddly. But if I examine earlier dates in the Reliability Monitor, I see no
Dragon Age issues.
At the same time, I’d been running into other issues. USB ports would randomly stop working. Every now and then, I’d lose my network connection. The frequency of these sorts of events has been increasing over time.
This finally led me to the conclusion that my motherboard's I/O Controller Hub was starting to fail. USB, some PCI Express lanes, and networking all hang off ICH10 on my X58 motherboard. So I’ve ordered up a new motherboard to replace it.
One of the major sources of problems with any new operating system release is compatibility with existing applications. The problem, of course, is that not all apps written for older versions of Windows will run on a newer version.
The compatibility troubleshooter helps you determine if an app will run under Windows 7, whether it needs tweaks, or if it will run at all. However, it’s not a particularly user-friendly tool.
You can get to the compatibility troubleshooter from within the Windows Action Center by clicking on the Troubleshooting link at the bottom of the pane. This takes you to the Troubleshooting control panel page. The top entry is "Programs: Run programs made for earlier versions of Windows."
When you run this, you get a huge list of all applications installed on your system, not just the ones that Windows thinks may be incompatible. If you’re like me, that means wading through a very, very long list. However, I knew of one older application that would have problems: Nikon Transfer, which came on a CD with my Nikon D300 digital SLR.
You can actually fix compatibility issues with the compatibility troubleshooter.
After clicking through the buttons, the compatibility troubleshooter set up Nikon Transfer to run as a Windows XP SP2 app. At that point, it ran without any hitches under 64-bit Windows 7.
The troubleshooter isn’t perfect, though. For example, it assigned Steam as an app that should run as if it were a Windows Vista mode. Steam complained about this, popping up a message telling me in no uncertain terms that compatibility mode for Steam was a bad idea, so I manually set it to run as a native application.
Of course, the right way to run the troubleshooter is every time you install an application--at least, one that hasn’t been written with Windows 7 in mind. And you can, of course, right click on any application executable and manually change compatibility settings. But the troubleshooter does a pretty good job of automagically setting up the right compatibility mode.
The Windows Resource Monitor is a useful tool for monitoring overall resource use under Windows. It’s actually not as useful as it was under Windows XP, where power users could easily exhaust available system handles. Still, it’s interesting to check out overall system resource usage; it can help you, for example, determine if adding more memory might be a good thing.
More useful is the Computer Management Console. You can run this by bringing up the Run window and typing "compmgmt.msc."
Computer Management is a central place for accessing many system admin functions.
From the main management window, you can get to a number of useful tools. Using this applet is worth an article or several just by itself, so we’ll mention just a couple of tools in passing.
The first is the System Diagnostics panel, which is under Performance -> System -> System Diagnostics. There’s a wealth of data here to drill into, and most of it, even the ones flagged as errors, aren’t really all that useful. But you do occasionally find nuggets of information that can lead you to problem solutions.
The Services panel (Services and Applications -> Services) shows you a list of services that are running or dormant. This has proven useful a couple of times. For example, I had an early version of Acronis True Image that I’d installed and uninstalled. When I checked the services panel, I found the Acronis License manager running, and consuming memory and resources. So I had to track it down and uninstall it.
System Information is another moderately useful tool, which you can run by typing "msinfo32.exe" in the run window. The most useful bit here is the "Problem Devices" listing. In this example, I’ve got an extra copy of my printer set up, but not active, so I need to uninstall it. I also have a PS/2 keyboard port with nothing attached. This is a little more useful than trying to peruse the Device Manager listings.
System Information lets you check out the state of your hardware.
This is by no means an exhaustive list of system troubleshooting tools in Windows 7. We haven’t touched on the performance monitor, event viewer, or (if you have Microsoft Office installed), Microsoft Office Diagnostics. All can be useful, depending on how deep you want to dive and what types of problems you’re encountering.
Understanding what tools are available, however, should help you better solve problems you encounter. The tools in Windows 7 are more comprehensive and easier to use than past versions as well. So before you reach for the phone to call tech support, maybe diving into one of these tools may save you some time and money, plus give you the satisfaction of solving your own problems.
