Thinkpads Forum

I have a widescreen T60 with a Core 2 Duo processor, currently running Windows XP SP3. What's the most straightforward way to install Windows 7 64-bit on it? I believe that this processor is 64-bit capable.

There is no upgrade path from 32 to 64 bit - you will need to do a clean install. Just a note however, your system will only be able to "see" 3gb of ram, so unless you require 64-bit for a specific program, there is no advantage to switching over.

All Core 2 Duo processors support 64-bit, so you are good if you want to upgrade anyway.

craigmontHunter wrote:There is no upgrade path from 32 to 64 bit - you will need to do a clean install. Just a note however, your system will only be able to "see" 3gb of ram, so unless you require 64-bit for a specific program, there is no advantage to switching over.

My motivation is that some music software I'm using doesn't support XP in the next version -- so I suppose I might as well upgrade to Win7 32bit if there's an easier way to do that.

You're basically stuck with doing a fresh (custom) W7 install. There is no direct upgrade path from XP to W7. There is a utility that allows you to migrate important settings/files though.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/wind ... -windows-7
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/wind ... r-computer

Harryc wrote:You're basically stuck with doing a fresh (custom) W7 install.

Does this imply that I should buy the full retail version of Windows 7 rather than the upgrade version? Putting it another way, is there any way to tell Microsoft that I already have a license for XP so I can call it an upgrade even though it's a clean install?

If you already have an XP install, you want the upgrade version. It allows you to do a clean (custom) install of W7.

Harryc wrote:If you already have an XP install, you want the upgrade version. It allows you to do a clean (custom) install of W7.

Ah, I get it (I think): Installing overwrites the existing XP installation with a clean W7 installation.

I'm still wondering about 32- vs. 64 bits, despite the 3GB limitation. I use this machine for making music, and a lot of music software works by loading an entire sample library into virtual memory, which can take a gigabyte or more. What happens next is that only the actual notes you play wind up in the working set, so the physical memory requirements are much smaller--but increasingly, music software is moving in the direction of not working at all unless you have an address space available of more than 2GB.

Do you happen to know whether it is possible to do a custom install of W7 64-bit on top of XP 32-bit? Presumably it erases the old system either way.

ark wrote:Do you happen to know whether it is possible to do a custom install of W7 64-bit on top of XP 32-bit? Presumably it erases the old system either way.

Yes that is doable. Just get a W7 64bit upgrade.

[quote="Harryc"][quote="ark"]Do you happen to know whether it is possible to do a custom install of W7 64-bit on top of XP 32-bit? Presumably it erases the old system either way.
Yes that is doable. Just get a W7 64bit upgrade.






I was told you can not install a 64 bit upgrade over a 32 bit ops.
You must do a fresh install with a full version.
It dose not completely erase the old OPS but operates over it like another layer.

goraman wrote: I was told you can not install a 64 bit upgrade over a 32 bit ops.
You must do a fresh install with a full version.
It dose not completely erase the old OPS but operates over it like another layer.

False, the upgrade we're referring to is actually a fresh install of W7, and the architecture is irrelevant. In fact it puts your XP files in a folder called windows.old. . I think you're getting hung up on upgrades of past Microsoft OS's. W7 is not the same ...

So can you install a 64 bit upgrade of windows 7 Ultimate upgrade over windows 7 32 bit home premium?

Yes, but it is not really an upgrade. It will be a fresh 'custom' install of W7 64bit. There is no traditional upgrade path from Windows 7 32 bit to Windows 7 64 bit.
Here, study this - http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/wind ... -questions

OK... So it sounds like the most sensible way of installing Windows 7 is this:

1) Start with a clean (i.e. newly formatted) disk.
2) Use the product recovery disks to reinstall the factory-shipped version of Windows XP (so that the minimum amount of additional stuff is there).
3) Do a new custom install of Windows 7 from a retail distribution.
4) Load whatever Thinkpad-specific drivers I want from the Lenovo website.

My one question is what to do about getting DVD playing/burning software installed on Win7. I have the CD that came with my machine that says "Contains WinDVD 5.011, MultiMedia Center for Think Offerings 2.2, WinDVD Creator 3.1, and UDF Reader 5.2", but will any of that stuff install or run under Win7?

Oops -- I go to the Lenovo site and it says: "Only the operating systems listed below are supported on these systems."

and lists only Windows 2000, XP, Vista, except for the Bluetooth, Thinkvantage Toolbox (32-bit only), System Update, Hotkey Features, and LCD calibration drivers.

Does this imply that all other drivers are part of Windows 7? What about power management, for example? ATI video drivers?

Check this page. It shows drivers that are available for Win7.
http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/researc ... MIGR-62928
- Power Manager is listed as available for Win7

I think the Vista drivers might work.

I understand that some XP drivers can be installed under win7.
There are a bunch of hits when I do a Google search on "windows 7 xp driver compatibility"

I understand that ATI stopped support for some video cards, so no Win7 drivers for them.
I have a G40 that is in a similar situation, no Win7 video drivers. So it will likely stay on XP.

ac12 wrote:Check this page. It shows drivers that are available for Win7.
http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/researc ... MIGR-62928
- Power Manager is listed as available for Win7

My machine is a T60 widescreen, type 8743, which has a different driver matrix.

Why would you WANT to install 64-bit Windows on a machine whose chipset can't address 4GB+ of ram?

I appologize for not reading the entire thread, so sorry if this has been mentioned already, but I strongly suggest you reformat your drive when installing windows seven. If you install over top of an incompatible version, it will save all your old files, including big and bulky ones like pagefile and hibernations files in a "windows_old" folder.

This doesn't sound like a problem at first, but it is. This files will be "owned" by the user account "trusted installer" and there is NO WAY to delete them from within the windows GUI.

In order to delete the files, according to microsoft (I've actually been through this), you need to run a command-line script on EACH AND EVERY SINGLE FILE, one at a time.... TWICE!!!

The first script is to release ownership from "Trusted Installer", which is a temporary user account that installs windows and is never heard or seen again., then a second script to take ownership "takeown". Then from there you'll need admin privleges to change the security settings to allow full control of your user account and only then can that one file be deleted.

I ended up booting a Linux LiveCD environment and I was able to delete the entire tree in one fell swoop... TIMBER!!! but you get my point, a simple quick format during install and your drive will be clean and fresh with no XP left overs to cause conflicts later.

An even better option would be to repartition the harddrive and install win7 in it's own partition. You can do this with a very popular freeware app called "parted magic" (google it). burn the disc and boot from it then resize your existing partition and make a new one, formatted for NTFS. Now install Windows Seven and when you boot you'll get a screen asking if you want to load windows seven, or older windows. If you select older, then your original XP will load.

JeffCullen wrote:Why would you WANT to install 64-bit Windows on a machine whose chipset can't address 4GB+ of ram?

Sorry, I should have addressed this issue in my reply.

32bit windows versions are restricted to 2GB for any app, so even if you can only install 3GB, with x64 you can actually use all 3GB with one APP if needed.

This and other enhancements in the AMD x86-64 extension to Intel x86 architecture make the 64bit OS superior in many ways, not just in the total memory the system can use.

TuuS wrote:32bit windows versions are restricted to 2GB for any app, so even if you can only install 3GB, with x64 you can actually use all 3GB with one APP if needed.

I am pretty sure that there is a mode in XP that allows a single app to use up to 3GB of data space.

But putting that aside, I am using some software with subsystems that run only on 64-bit processors, even though they don't use much memory. I don't know the reason for the restriction.

ark wrote: I am pretty sure that there is a mode in XP that allows a single app to use up to 3GB of data space.

But putting that aside, I am using some software with subsystems that run only on 64-bit processors, even though they don't use much memory. I don't know the reason for the restriction.

I believe it's called 4GBM (4gigabit mode), which is an app that allows you to specify how much of the 4GB address space is reserved for system, and how much for the app. By default, it's 2GB system, 2GB app, but you can tweak it upto 1GB system, 3GB app, however this cannot be enabled on any of the 32bit systems that support greater then 4GB of ram, so it pretty much becomes useless, and even on a good day, it pales when compared to the 64bit alternative.

One of the systems I use for software testing is running 32bit variety of XP that supports 64GB ram (server 2003 datacenter edition), but even it is limited to 2GB per app.

Well... I decided to give it a try to see what would happen. I had an old disk with a still-working XP installation on it, so I installed Windows 7 on top of that.

I decided on 64-bit because even though the machine is limited to 3GB of physical RAM, I'd rather be able to set things up the same way as on my newer machines.

The installation was completely uneventful. When it was finished, I had a machine with a very low-resolution display. However, I ran Windows Update, it downloaded 80 updates or so, and one of those was a driver for the (discontinued) Radeon X1400 controller. As far as I could tell, it worked fine.

There was still some missing functionality--for example, when the machine went into standby, there was no way to bring it back out and still have the display working. But I downloaded ThinkVantage System Update, it auto-installed a bunch of drivers, and now I have just about everything I had before except for Catalyst Control Center, which I never used anyway except to turn off its power-saving features that caused occasional blue screens.

So at least so far, everything seems to be working just fine. I have a 750GB Momentus XT drive on order; when it arrives, I shall make an image of my system disk, restore it onto the new drive, and see how that works. Even without it, Win7 seems to start up much faster than XP.

ark wrote:Even without it, Win7 seems to start up much faster than XP.

A new installation of anything always starts up much faster than an old installation of anything.