Operating System Upgrade Help.

[lonsdale2091]

I am looking to upgrade my pc to a more usable state without spending too much money.

Basically at the minute i have a 32-bit Vista OS and i am wanting to upgrade to a 64-bit 7/10 OS to get a bit more out of my hardware. My pc will support a 64-bit OS as i have checked this in line with my cpu and motherboard etc. (Unsure on motherboard model but cpu is a amd phenom quad core)

Rather than having to spend too much time backing up and doing a clean restore and install on my old small (300gb) hard drive can i just buy a new hard drive and install into my machine and then install a new OS to this new hard drive enabling me to just keep the old hard drive as is and just access for storage purposes?

So let's say i currently download the latest motherboard, graphics, wireless drivers onto a usb then remove my current hard drive and set aside could i:

• 
  Put new hard drive in machine
  Install OS
  Install drivers

And have a back to square one, clean install?


Thanks.

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

Yes you can install your 64-bit OS on to a new hard drive no problem. Remove existing hard drive first though, you can put it back as a storage drive afterwards.

And in case you were wondering, 32-bit Windows can't be "upgraded" to 64-bit anyway - - 64-bit has to be cleanly installed to an empty partition.

 

[lonsdale2091]

Yes you can install your 64-bit OS on to a new hard drive no problem. Remove existing hard drive first though, you can put it back as a storage drive afterwards.

And in case you were wondering, 32-bit Windows can't be "upgraded" to 64-bit anyway - - 64-bit has to be cleanly installed to an empty partition.

Thanks, once i put the old hard drive back in, it won't try to run the os from that or have any issues just enabling me to access files on there?
That's fine re. upgrading 32bit as i'm just purchasing a new 64-bit os anyway. I'm thinking i may just get an 128gb ssd to install as primary hard drive to put the new os on and any frequent programs and use my old hard drive for media storage basically.
Thanks again!

 

[Phillip Corcoran]

When you put the old hard drive back in, the PC will still boot from whatever device is listed as the first boot device in the BIOS - - that will be your new SSD with the new Windows on it. Just make sure your new Windows boots and runs okay before you put the old hard drive back.

Accessing files that exist in your old Windows user account folders on the old hard drive will require a few tweaks because you'll be wanting to access those folders from a different (new) user account. If you don't make the necessary security changes you'll just get "Access denied" because Windows thinks you're trying to access somebody else's files (even though you created those files, your new Windows doesn't know that).

Just follow this guide: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/windows-and-office/quick-tip-take-ownership-of-files-and-folders-in-windows/