Upgrading to 64-bit

Ok, so I have just bought an MSI GX620, which comes with 4GB of ram but a 32-bit version of vista home premium. Since I want to take full advantage of my ram, I will be upgrading to 64-bit.

After some research I have gathered that the only legal way of doing this without having to pay any money is to borrow a vista home premium 64-bit DVD from a friend and install with my own product key. Already got that, so it's all good. I just have a few questions, as I am not very experienced, and believe it or not have never completely reinstalled windows.

I've been looking for info on how exactly to perform a clean install of windows and since I haven't really found much I am guessing it is very straight-forward, and just a matter of following instructions on the DVD. Is this correct? I'm going to install vista as soon as I get my laptop, so there would be no need to back up any data. So I can just stick the DVD in and that's it?

I was also wondering how I should go about installing the drivers. Would you recommend that I download them all and save them onto a CD before doing the reinstall? Does it matter? Also, I have looked on the MSI website and they only seem to have drivers for vista 32-bit, I am guessing they will work with vista 64-bit, even though I was always under the impression you would need completely different drivers for the two different architectures.

Is there anything else I should do, or be aware of before completing the clean install?

Thanks a lot in advance

- luiz

 

A clean install is done by booting the Vista x64 DVD and choosing to do a clean install. Vista is designed to be installable by soccer moms. It's not that complicated.

You should at the very least have the network drivers available in case Vista x64 does not have them. This way you can at least get network support going, and then you can just download all the other drivers if needed.

 

For everything 64-bit related, go to Start64.com - if it's not there, it doesn't exist. Don't assume right away that's all you need to do - go through the information there and learn everything you need to do first or you'll be back here posting again on how to fix a failed install/upgrade...

 

There was some debate as to whether or not the overclocking utilities would work in 64 bit, I can't remember what the final answer was though. Keep that in mind.

 

Here's a very good guide on clean installing Vista. In this guide, you will find out how to activate your Vista after the clean install (this only works if the Vista on your computer was installed by the manufacturer of your laptop, aka OEM) In case you're wondering after reading the whole guide, yes, you can use your the product key for your 32-bit Vista to activate 64-bit Vista. Make sure you follow the guide word for word. If you just started using your laptop and you haven't got any data of yours in it, then by all means, go forward with the clean install.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=120228

Look through the partition where your OS is installed on. There may be a folder containing all the drivers that have been installed on your computer. Copy this folder into an external USB flash drive or HDD. Some drivers in there may work on 64-bit Vista. About the MSI website having only 32-bit drivers, I've tried navigating through their website but I couldn't even find 1 link to download any driver. (Maybe I have to register a MSI laptop). Anyways, in case the drivers doesn't work on your 64-bit Vista, you will have to look at the website of the manufacturer of the component of which driver you're looking for. For example, let's say you're trying to find a driver for an NVIDIA GeForce 9600M GT, you'd better go to www.nvidia.com (or maybe www.laptopvideo2go.com, for some laptop users).

Well, it's best to cover all possible scenarios in case something goes wrong. I'm not familiar with the MSI brand of laptops, but if your laptop has a recovery partition, I recommend burning a set of recovery disks, so that you can revert to the pre-clean install state. If your laptop comes with recovery disks, those work too. You can also use Acronis True Image (you can download this for free from their website; there's a 15-day trial, I think) to make a copy/backup of your hard disk and store it somewhere safe before you start your clean install.