Going from 32 to 64

[Blorp Kola]

I am looking to upgrade my current 4GB of ram to 8GB. For this I understand that I need the 64 bit version of Windows XP. I have a hard drive with 3 partitions and I was wondering whether it was possible to back up all of my stuff on another partition rather than using an external hard drive. Does installing a new OS only format one partition?
Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[sminlal]

I strongly recommend you upgrade to Windows 7 rather than using the 64-bit version of Windows XP. Windows XP is very old and the 64-bit version of it has very poor hardware support compared to Windows 7. That means you'll have a hard time getting drivers for your printer, scanner, etc.

When you install Windows 7 you have a choice of installing it into the existing XP partition - it will rename the existing "Windows" folder to "Windows.Old" and create a new folder containing the new system. But if you can, I'd recommend buying a new drive and installing Windows 7 directly onto it, as that will (a) give you an easy way to revert to your XP system if anything goes wrong, and (b) give you a much cleaner installation on a disk that has no fragmentation.

When you install Windows 7, I recommend disconnecting everything except for the OS drive. The Windows 7 install likes to create a boot partition on another drive if it can find one, but most people prefer their system to boot from the OS drive directly.