Upgrading a Laptop

Upgrading is never easy. No matter how much preparation you make.


We decided to upgrade all the developers laptops on the team by increasing the RAM and moving from Windows XP to Windows 7 64 bit. We started by getting more RAM and increasing to 4 GB. Of course, because we were running Windows XP 32 bit, so we only got a usable 3.48 GB of RAM. While that is an improvement over the 2GB we had before we wanted more.

So we are now attempting to upgrade to Windows 7. I spent the better part of the last two days backing up and installing. Backing up took all night despite the use of some helpful migration tools available from Microsoft.

The installation went quite smoothly and so far the new system is working nicely. Unfortunately, I still have only 3.48 GB of RAM. It turns out that I installed the 32 bit version. Hmm. Now I will have to get the 64 bit cd and do it all over again. At least this time I have everything backed up so if the installation runs smoothly then I will not have  to spend too much time on the operation.