I preordered Windows 7 months ago, and it should be in my mailbox tomorrow. So, in preparation, I have two questions.
First: it seems that 32-bit systems are falling out of date, and 62-bit is preferred nowadays. I don't have enough technical knowledge to know the difference; about all I know is that a 64-bit system lets you access more RAM. Can anyone give me a crash course in the practical differences between the two? And, how will using a 64-bit installation of Windows 7 affect my programs? (I.e., will certain games not run on a 64-bit OS? I've heard about that kind of issue in the past, and I'm worried that especially my older games will suddenly be totally unusable.)
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Second: to coincide with the arrival of 7, I got a new hard drive to replace the two-year-old 500GB drive I've been using. I plan to install to the new (1TB) drive, partition it, and use it as my primary drive, and then use the old drive for backing up files.
Now, normally, the process of reformatting or reinstalling an OS requires that you back up anything important to an external/secondary drive, and then transfer it back to the primary drive after the OS is reinstalled. However, since I am installing to a new drive and retaining the old drive for backups, if I just plug the new drive into the motherboard, install the OS to it, and then boot into the OS, will I be able to manually access the old drive and find that all of my files are accessible and usable? This seems intuitively like it would be the case, but the reason I doubt it is because, the way I see it, that older drive is not formatted like a backup drive would be. For example, the drive I use for backups now is pretty much just a hard drive that has files written to it; on the other hand, the main drive is formatted around an OS, it is password-protected, etc. So, would that change the way that I would access its files, or even outright prohibit me from doing so? (If I can explain this question any better let me know.)
Thanks for reading.
First: it seems that 32-bit systems are falling out of date, and 62-bit is preferred nowadays. I don't have enough technical knowledge to know the difference; about all I know is that a 64-bit system lets you access more RAM. Can anyone give me a crash course in the practical differences between the two? And, how will using a 64-bit installation of Windows 7 affect my programs? (I.e., will certain games not run on a 64-bit OS? I've heard about that kind of issue in the past, and I'm worried that especially my older games will suddenly be totally unusable.)
---------------
Second: to coincide with the arrival of 7, I got a new hard drive to replace the two-year-old 500GB drive I've been using. I plan to install to the new (1TB) drive, partition it, and use it as my primary drive, and then use the old drive for backing up files.
Now, normally, the process of reformatting or reinstalling an OS requires that you back up anything important to an external/secondary drive, and then transfer it back to the primary drive after the OS is reinstalled. However, since I am installing to a new drive and retaining the old drive for backups, if I just plug the new drive into the motherboard, install the OS to it, and then boot into the OS, will I be able to manually access the old drive and find that all of my files are accessible and usable? This seems intuitively like it would be the case, but the reason I doubt it is because, the way I see it, that older drive is not formatted like a backup drive would be. For example, the drive I use for backups now is pretty much just a hard drive that has files written to it; on the other hand, the main drive is formatted around an OS, it is password-protected, etc. So, would that change the way that I would access its files, or even outright prohibit me from doing so? (If I can explain this question any better let me know.)
Thanks for reading.
