Upgrading 32bit Vista to Windows 7 64bit

Problem

As a last ditch effort to deal with my motherboard problem, I’ve decided to upgrade my OS from Windows Vista Home Premium to Windows 7 RC1 (Ultimate).

Problem is, I’d like to upgrade to the 64bit version of Windows 7 (so that I could take advantage of all of my 4GB of memory). But as the upgrade chart from Microsoft states, you can’t do an in-place upgrade from 32bit Vista to 64bit Windows 7, keeping all of your files and settings intact.

Solution

Fortunately, there is a way to keep a good portion of your files and settings intact via the Windows Easy Transfer utility. I just used Method 3 and transferred my entire C drive to my 1TB hard drive.

As an extra precaution, I made a copy of my “user” directory (in my case it’s C:\Users\bry\ folder) in the backup hard drive. We’ll see a use for this backup later.

After backing up via Windows Easy Transfer, I went ahead and reformatted my C drive and installed Windows 7 64 bit on it.

Once I finished installing Windows 7, I restored my settings via Windows Easy Transfer again, following the “Copy files from the source computer” section in Method 3.

After that, I went ahead and installed new drivers for all of my devices. Windows Easy Transfer only backs up settings so I also had to re-download and re-install all of my old programs like Firefox, Chrome, Yahoo Messenger, etc.

Turns out that some of the files and settings were not properly transferred to the new OS installation. Here’s how I restored my settings to various programs:

• Firefox 3.5 – I copied the contents of my old profile from [user backup folder]\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default to the newly created C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\yyyyyyyy.default folder.
• Chrome 2 – similar to Firefox, I copied the contents of my old profile from [user backup folder]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default to the newly created C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default folder.
• Yahoo Messenger – most of the important data (e.g. contacts, current display icon) is already stored in the Yahoo servers. The main reason why one would want to restore their old profile would be their Message Archive. To restore your profile, copy [user backup folder]\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\Yahoo!\Messenger\Profiles\[your Yahoo ID] to the newly created C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\Yahoo!\Messenger\Profiles\[your Yahoo ID] folder. Don’t forget to set the Archive Preferences to “Yes, save all of my messages”.
• FileZilla – Copy [user backup folder]\AppData\Roaming\FileZilla to the newly created C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Roaming\FileZilla folder.