Upgrading to Win7 from Vista Ultimate

[Bubba22]

Right now I'm running Vista Ultimate 32bit in bootcamp and am ready for a change. What I would ideally like to do is to switch over to Win7 64bit (in order to utilize my 4gb of ram) without having to reinstall all of my windows applications and games. Right now I'm really looking for the easiest and most efficient way of doing this (assuming it's possible to transfer between a 32 and 64bit operating system).

What I had planned was to do things in this order:

1) Clone my bootcamp partition to my external hard drive using winclone.
2) Erase my bootcamp partition
3) Install Win7 to the bootcamp parition
4) Use the Windows Easy Transfer tool to migrate all of my vista files from the external hard drive over to Win7
5) Hopefully enjoy a much improved OS with all my programs fully functional

Please tell me if I have neglected something or if there are any potential problems along the way. If it maters I have an early 2008 Macbook Pro, 2.5ghz, 4gb ram, 8600m 512mb.

Thanks.

 

[LtRammstein]

Hey, that's what I'm doing when I upgrade in a few weeks!

 

[steveza]

I'm not sure if you can transfer applications in thsi way. Files and settings aren't a problem but you may have to reinstall the applications.

 

[Bubba22]

After doing a bit more reading I'm thinking I'm better off doing an in-place upgrade of vista. Now what I need to know is if this is possible (moving from Vista x86 to Win7 x64).

 

[The Flashing Fi]

After doing a bit more reading I'm thinking I'm better off doing an in-place upgrade of vista. Now what I need to know is if this is possible (moving from Vista x86 to Win7 x64).

No, it's not. You cannot upgrade a 32-bit OS to a 64-bit OS without reformat.

 

[aki]

yeah im in same sort of place

im thinking to have a clean system and everything i should really plan for a complete fresh win7 install....i have heard inplace installs are not always so great or reliable

so i am trying to finish the games i have now so i dont have to reinstall so much

 

[steveza]

Do a straight upgrade to W7 32bit and don't worry about the extra few hundred MB of RAM. When W7 is fully released you can decide if it's worth the trouble of doing a clean install to 64bit. No point reinstalling everything twice.