Good day,
I'm about to take the Vista 64 plunge and I could best be described as anxious. I excited to upgrade, but I'm scared to death I'm gonna destroy my system, lose my data, and experience a heart attack with all the anger that typically goes along with a new OS.
First the rationale: I need to redo my system anyway, I may as well upgrade while I'm going through the pain.
The main reasons for this are twofold: First I'm getting fairly regular blue screens of death (1 or 2 a day) for an unknown reason (usually on shut down or when I start up a program that accesses the internet, there is no single stimuli that automatically causes these errors). Without any direction, I'd have to do a clean reinstall anyway to eliminate the possibilities of hidden viruses, bad drivers, etc, etc. Second, I want to have full connectivity between my Xbox 360 in my living room and my computer in my office. My existing setup is XP 32 Media on a 150G Raptor 10k RPM HD that stores my executables and 2 other SATA 3.0 drives that have all my media(d and e drives). The problem is my 360 and my Denon receiver only like to look in the C:\my documents folder for media. I can't get the 360 to stream media from my E: drive which is where all my pics, videos, and music live. The Raptor is not big enough to store all my media, and why would I waste a 10k RPM HD on media anyway
? According to MS support (who I phoned) there is no work around.
Current hardware: AMD 64 X2 4400+, ABIT mobo, 2G RAM, SB X-fi, 2 x 7950GT running SLI, Raptor 150G HD + 2 3.0 SATA 250G HDs.
Modifications to hardware: Adding 2 more gig RAM, and replacing the 2 250G hard drives with a 1TB HD. The 1TB drive will be my new C: drive and will hold my OS and all my media, the Raptor will still store all my applications.
Computer uses: Embarassingly enough, the computer gets at least half its use playing WoW. The other half is divided among running office '07, movie players, itunes, telnet, firefox, and outlook express.
OK, this is where the fun starts
1) Do I need to partition this huge 1TB drive, and if I do so will the "my documents" folder go on the small OS partition or the ginormous remainder of the drive? (I've got several hundred gig of photos, videos, and music and it's only growing larger -- I need space).
2) How do I deal with my existing Raptor HD? It's got all my executables already loaded as well as XP32 Media. I don't want to lose the data I've already got there, but I also don't want dueling OSes.
3) Anything I'm not thinking of that you can recommend before I shoot myself in the foot. I'd prefer to not reinvent the wheel so any beginner tips would be muchly appreciated.
Thanks!
I'm about to take the Vista 64 plunge and I could best be described as anxious. I excited to upgrade, but I'm scared to death I'm gonna destroy my system, lose my data, and experience a heart attack with all the anger that typically goes along with a new OS.
First the rationale: I need to redo my system anyway, I may as well upgrade while I'm going through the pain.
The main reasons for this are twofold: First I'm getting fairly regular blue screens of death (1 or 2 a day) for an unknown reason (usually on shut down or when I start up a program that accesses the internet, there is no single stimuli that automatically causes these errors). Without any direction, I'd have to do a clean reinstall anyway to eliminate the possibilities of hidden viruses, bad drivers, etc, etc. Second, I want to have full connectivity between my Xbox 360 in my living room and my computer in my office. My existing setup is XP 32 Media on a 150G Raptor 10k RPM HD that stores my executables and 2 other SATA 3.0 drives that have all my media(d and e drives). The problem is my 360 and my Denon receiver only like to look in the C:\my documents folder for media. I can't get the 360 to stream media from my E: drive which is where all my pics, videos, and music live. The Raptor is not big enough to store all my media, and why would I waste a 10k RPM HD on media anyway
? According to MS support (who I phoned) there is no work around.Current hardware: AMD 64 X2 4400+, ABIT mobo, 2G RAM, SB X-fi, 2 x 7950GT running SLI, Raptor 150G HD + 2 3.0 SATA 250G HDs.
Modifications to hardware: Adding 2 more gig RAM, and replacing the 2 250G hard drives with a 1TB HD. The 1TB drive will be my new C: drive and will hold my OS and all my media, the Raptor will still store all my applications.
Computer uses: Embarassingly enough, the computer gets at least half its use playing WoW. The other half is divided among running office '07, movie players, itunes, telnet, firefox, and outlook express.
OK, this is where the fun starts
1) Do I need to partition this huge 1TB drive, and if I do so will the "my documents" folder go on the small OS partition or the ginormous remainder of the drive? (I've got several hundred gig of photos, videos, and music and it's only growing larger -- I need space).
2) How do I deal with my existing Raptor HD? It's got all my executables already loaded as well as XP32 Media. I don't want to lose the data I've already got there, but I also don't want dueling OSes.
3) Anything I'm not thinking of that you can recommend before I shoot myself in the foot. I'd prefer to not reinvent the wheel so any beginner tips would be muchly appreciated.
Thanks!
