Needing to upgrade from Win7 Home Premium to 7Pro

[kyotokid]

...Looking to upgrade the memory in my graphics workstation from 12GB to 24GB. The one "rub" is I need to also update my Win7 from Home Premium to Pro as Premium only supports up to 16GB. Microsoft has pretty much stopped selling Win7 in any form so the online "Anytime Upgrade" path is rather useless, unless I am willing to pay nearly 400$ at Amazon for an "Anytime Upgrade" version (ridiculous when the original OEM cost me around 100$ and a full Win7 Pro OEM sells for about 130$ - 140$).

This seems to leave the only option being a full clean install of the complete Win7 Pro OS which is a huge bother as I would have to back everything up and then wipe the system. Not a small undertaking considering the apps and files I currently have on the system.

I am currently running two HDDs a 250GB boot/application drive and a 1TB "Library/Runtime" drive. Considering that the larger drive only contains files and no application installs would I only need to backup and wipe the smaller Boot drive for the install or both? If that were the case, it would make the job a bit less "painful" as I have all the application installers already backed up.

Though less expensive, not interested in 8.1 as I really don't care for all the tweaking it requires to get it to look and run more like 7 (I also do use the start menu quite frequently) and the upgrade routine from 7 is rather lame as you pretty much need to do a lot of the the same tasks as if you performed a full clean install.

 

[Wolfshadw]

Windows 7 Professional OEM - from $135

The real question is why do you need to upgrade to 24GB of RAM?

-Wolf sends

 

[kyotokid]

Windows 7 Professional OEM - from $135

The real question is why do you need to upgrade to 24GB of RAM?

-Wolf sends

...I work with 3D CG. and have been moving into using the Luxender rendering engine. On the last several render jobs I submitted I have received high memory use warnings when beginning a render job. On one occasion the process caused Windows to issue an out of memory error which froze the system after which it rebooted.

I also use Renderman's 3Delight render engine and on several occasions, the process pegged memory usage at just under 11 of the 12 GB I have. On a couple occasions, I had several scene files corrupted when the memory limit was exceeded and I had to close the application I was working in via Task Manager.

When I built the system a couple years ago, 12 GB was enough. With changes to and expansions in the software I use, as well as the level of detail my work now involves, that is no longer the case.

 

[Wolfshadw]

Unfortunately, you really don't have much of an option. You do not need to format your 1TB data drive, but you will need to wipe and re-install your OS and applications on your OS drive. Also make sure your motherboard accepts 24GB of RAM.

-Wolf sends

 

[kyotokid]

Unfortunately, you really don't have much of an option. You do not need to format your 1TB data drive, but you will need to wipe and re-install your OS and applications on your OS drive. Also make sure your motherboard accepts 24GB of RAM.

-Wolf sends

...well that is a bit of a relief as all the custom setups are on the 1 TB library drive. Reinstalling just the applications is not as much of a bother.

When I purchased the MB, memory expansion was one of my first considerations. 24GB is the maximum it will support.

As to memory, in my field one cannot have "too much". I remember one fellow on my CG forums with a fully decked out Mac Pro (64 GB RAM, dual 6 core hypetheading 3.2 GHz Xeons) mentioned he bought that system to it's knees rendering a scene loaded with reflectivity and transparency maps.