Since I have so many MP3s, videos, and other crap on my hard drive, when I purchase Windows 7, my plan is to buy a new drive, do a clean install on it, and relegate my current drive to secondary status. I’ve done this in the past, and it’s much easier to just delete unneeded stuff off the old drive after the fact than it is to backup everything first, reformat, install os, restore data files, etc.
For the first time, though, I plan to install the 64 bit version. Will there be any problems with Windows 7 reading my old hard drive? I’m thinking along the lines of NTFS vs. FAT16 - will it be necessary to format a hard drive in some 64-bit format to get full performance out of it in a 64-bit OS?
None whatsoever. I did exactly what you described in the OP just last week… I Upgraded to Windows 7 64 bit. I’ve had no problems reading old hard drives of varying file systems.
64-bit just gives you the ability to address a vast amount more RAM than 32-bit. 32-bit currently tops out at about 3.5gb and since RAM is so cheap nowadays and comes in 2gb sticks, it’s easily possible to install more than your computer can use if you’re running 32-bit. 64-bit won’t run into such a limitation for a while yet- start to worry when you see systems with 256tb (256,000gb!) of RAM!
The 64-bit OS doesn’t particularly care if you’re using FAT32 or NTFS or if you’re connected by IDE or SATA or SATA-to-IDE converter. The only nitpicky detail you might run into is that you might have to change the jumper on the old drive so that it is no longer set to master.
If you have old software (Windows 95-98 or earlier era, DOS games) and it’s 16-bit, a 64-bit version of Windows will not give you the time of day when you try to run it. 16-bit programs will not run at all under a 64-bit OS. However there are emulators (DOSBox for example) that will let you run these old programs in a 64-bit environment.
Your only problem will be if the hardware isn’t 64 bit compatible. I had an add in PCI IDE Add in card that wasn’t. The built in motherboard IDE interface was compatible.
I switched to 64bit a with Vista and Win 7. The hard drive will work fine.
Check your other accessories. There are no 64 bit drivers for my Canon scanner. It took a long time before 64 bit web cam drivers came out. My web cam is still not supported.
Registry cleaners (such as in uninstall programs) do not work on the 64 bit OS (yet).
You are making a good choice. The extra RAM is nice.
256 tebibytes of RAM wouldn’t be an issue–that’s 2^48 bytes, which is many orders of magnitude below the theoretical 64-bit limit (16 exbibytes, which is 18,446,744,074 gigabytes).
There’s another problem besides compatibility with switching to 64-bit: stuff generally takes up more memory. If you have a 1GB machine, Microsoft recommends either running 32 bit or adding more RAM before switching to 64 bit.
FWIW, I’d love to have just 6000 gigs of RAM. I think that would be an ideal sweet spot. 18 billion gigs seems a little pretentious for my day-to-day needs.