Upgrading OS

Ryanrulez5

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Nov 24, 2010
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Current OS is Vista 32 home basic I need to upgrade to windows 7 64 ASAP. Is there any way i can keep all my files when i upgrade (don't wanna download my entire steam library again). PS budget for OS is about £100 dont wanna spend £200 on ultimate.
 

AWAR

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Nov 15, 2009
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Ryanrulez5 said:
Current OS is Vista 32 home basic I need to upgrade to windows 7 64 ASAP. Is there any way i can keep all my files when i upgrade (don't wanna download my entire steam library again). PS budget for OS is about £100 dont wanna spend £200 on ultimate.
You already have a thread why not post there?

O.T. No, the Win7 version must be the same version as the Vista e.g.: Vista Home 32bit -> 7 Home 32bit. You need a clean install unfortunately.
 

Supernova1138

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Oct 24, 2011
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As said above, you have to do a full reinstall when moving from 32 to 64 bit. You don't necessarily have to reformat the partition, so a lot of your user files will be put into a Windows.old folder by the Windows 7 installer, but you should backup anything you want to keep anyway. If you don't want to redownload your Steam library, I suggest backing up your game files to another hard drive, external hard drive, DVD, whatever before upgrading.
 

SnowyGamester

Tech Head
Oct 18, 2009
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You may have to reinstall all of your Steam games however you won't have to redowload any of them. Assuming you have to do a reinstall (which you will have to do going from x86 to x64) once the process is complete simply install Steam and copy the steamapps folder from Windows.old/Program Files (x86)/Steam to your new Steam directory. Once that's done just reinstall the games from Steam and it should find all of the old files. Just make sure you don't format your drive in the process (or back up your files on another disk before the reinstall).

I also feel obliged to mention that Windows 8 is an improvement on 7 and is roughly equivalently priced.