I'd been meaning to make the shift from a 32-bit Windows 7 installation to 64-bit for a few weeks now, but I hadn't quite gotten around to it.
Among other reasons, I was never 100% happy with having Windows running off my solid state drive. Yeah, so solid state is probably the future, and it's certainly faster, but my experience was plagued with blue screens at random times. As far as I could tell, I'd made all the necessary adjustments, and even returned one solid state for another, but the blue screens continued to exist.
Traditional drives may be slower than solid state, but it's the drive technology that's been used for decades now, and there's something to be said for that. Maybe I'll give solid state another few years and then try again, but I've also got to be honest in that I really didn't find it a whole lot faster than my WD Velociraptor.
Another benefit is that RAM for my system is cheap as chips (get it? chips? yeah baby!), because I'm still back on DDR2 memory. I was able to get a couple of 1gig DDR2-PC6400's for $25 ea. Twice the memory for just an extra $50, I'm down for that.
Anyway, I could resist no longer, and last night, I got started on it. I cleaned up my computer's internals, put the Velociraptor back in, slotted in the new ram, and started installing Windows 7 64-bit.
That's when Microsoft showed up.
See, Vista wasn't that great an OS, let's be honest, but I gave them a go, and shortly after its initial release, bought the full Home Premium Vista. Because of that, when it came time to move on to Windows 7, I was able to buy just the upgrade version. Sweet, looking after the customer that looks after you, that's what I like to see.
Only, I shot myself in the foot.
I got almost all the way through the installation of Windows 7, and that's when it asked me for my product key.
...and then told me it was invalid. Just for kicks, and yeah, I tried, it told me my Vista key was also invalid.
I knew what it was trying to say, that it couldn't find the OS to upgrade, so it was looking for a "full version" key. Just, it would have been nice if it'd told me that right at the beginning, rather than having to make me wait for it.
So - and I can't believe that I have to do this - but every time I want to reinstall Windows 7, I have to install Vista first. Wow, that's user friendly... not.
Honestly, would it kill them to have it ask you for your full version's product key if it detects you're running the upgrade cd? Is this where we're at here in 2011? I realise we don't want people abusing the upgrade version to get the full version in it's place, but is this really the best we can do?
This all said, everything's running really sweet right now. Granted, it might've taken a couple of hours, but I'm loving it. My solid state is now the drive I install games on to, and even though I've got Wow and half a dozen games on Steam on it, it's still under half full.
It may have been at least 15 years since I bought my first desktop, but gaming on the pc is still where it's at for me. There is nothing better.
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