In-place upgrading from 32-bit to 64-bit

BlueBonnett said:

@mrjimphelps
With due respect sir, everything you wrote is common sense. My OS is already on an SSD and I do have an empty spare for the new 64-bit clean install.

Perhaps to you; but not everyone knows these things. I do this for a living, so I wanted to list the things I do, in case you didn't think of everything.

@mrjimphelps,
I should've realized where you're coming from, my bad. While I don't do this for a living, I'm only too aware that what is common sense to us isn't to others, and even then I still make dumb mistakes. I didn't mean to sound pretentious. But where I was coming from was doing extensive research on this and being saturated with nothing except "don't do it, it's impossible!" comments. It took a lot of sifting before finding some useful information.



Good news, though. I have managed to do the closest equivalent of upgrade-installing my 32-bit OS to 64-bit thanks to PCMover, a truly awesome program.


It wasn't perfect, I have to reinstall a few programs and reconfigure a few things but overall it was great. I was going to attempt to do it manually but after hearing that PCMover will adjust the registry in accordance with the old one, I figured I'd save myself the tedious grief.


COMODO Internet Security stopped working (I was warned in advance by PCMover that it won't be transferred) so I had to reinstall it but I forgot exactly which edition I was running before and the one I installed now isn't working properly so I'll have to get some tech support from them.


I lost many shell extensions which I'll have to re-add but I don't know them all by heart so I'll get to them as soon as the circumstance occurs when I need them. I lost many system settings like preferred font, desktop icon size, folder preferences and all kinds of stuff. IMO, these should've been remembered and saved by PCMover if they're stored in the registry but oh well.


The programs I was particularly worried about are fine, though. I'm sure I'll fix glitches as I run across them.


I lost all the modification and creation timestamps for all folders that PCMover copied over but luckily I have a neat little script to backup and restore them.



I hope this thread will be a hit when others are searching on Google on an easy way to migrate their OS from 32 to 64-bit without losing their programs or settings. I really wish this was suggested to me from the beginning or I would've done this a long time ago.

I'm a big fan of EaseUS. I use partition master and their backup tool regularly. Great developers. I believe their PCTrans is a good one but PCMover has collaborated with Windows to keep their transfering tool alive after Windows no longer wanted to keep it going so I felt that program was my best bet of them all.


Anyway, I'm kinda fixing things as I go and I noticed that a few important tasks in the task scheduler were not transferred over, but luckily I could easily export and import from the VM. But this is an example of the kind of things I should have on a checklist right now so I welcome suggestions. I'd rather get everything over with in one day rather than fix as I go.


Other things I noticed is some files lack icons. .csvs and .xls lost their icons. Where in the control panel do we control file associations and icons again?

Hi, just an update:


Some programs certainly have not been migrated successfully and did not properly function. Luckily, they all simply had to be reinstalled so far. One of them was an old Sony Sound Forge I bought a long time ago which I still have the CD for. The program itself did launch but I was dumbfounded that Time Stretch function didn't work which I use to shorten podcasts with so I can listen to them while commuting to work. It seems it was part of a separate function on the program's setup that allows it to be installed as a global tool that multiple programs can use.


Music Masterworks (also a very old app) failed with:

Code:

Error: MusicM and MusicMB fonts not registered correctly.
Reboot your computer and run Music MasterWorks again to fix this problem.

I'll have to dig up the CD somewhere and see if this can also be fixed.


All other programs seem fine.


Event Viewer for some reason is not functioning and I can't start the service. I get the following error:

Code:

Windows could not start the Windows Event Log service on Local Computer.

Error 4201: The instance name passed was not recognized as valid by a WMI data provider.

I fixed some file icons but some such as HTM remain blank.