Thanks John - that's reassuring - I reckon you'd have just about every program I have, plus many more.

Changing from XP Pro 32bit to Windows 7 64bit I did it with the double-boot possibility - which works quite well because if you do nothing the machine just boots normally into Win 7.

But I have never had to boot into XP - it seems that Windows 7 64bit just runs everything - at least it does for nearly a year now...

echo above - dual booted for a month, and found after a couple of days everything worked perfectly - erased xp. haven't looked back.

good luck....

I can understand your concerns, but you should feel confident in Windows 7. Simply... MS did a descent job in this release. IMHO.

Chad

I'm about to take the plunge, the only thing keeping me from doing it is the humongous number of apps I have installed in XP that would need to be re-installed under Win7 (my copy of Win7Pro has been sitting on the shelf since last year silently accusing me of sloth). However, reading this thread provided me with the answer. Install 7 as dual boot and take my time re-installing the apps. Then, when it's all migrated and working to my satisfaction, nuke the XP installation.

Go ahead, everything works on Win7 64. However, I'm still dual booting because I can still tryout some freebee software without the fear of bombing my system. And if my Win7 fails for some reason I can always collect my stuff ISO taking the drive out and piggybacking it on another PC.

Another reason is that if you want to have a games machine without bloating your work system.

I went from XP to Windows 7 Pro 64bit. The only things that don't work for me are some 32 bit plug ins in my audio editor - SONAR 64 bit. Some of them work, some don't. Most do. SONAR uses something called BitBridge to make the transition possible. There is also something called J-Bridge which some pople like.

But all in all my 32bit programs run perfectly on W7 64bit.

when I installed win764 last year, I found several programs that wouldn't install or wouldn't run correctly. I don't remember them all, but several were old Adobe products, others were related to my video work - such as Ulead Cool 3d - still my favorite app for titles. Several wouldn't even work in Windows XP Mode (a free download for Win764-pro, and maybe others), nor when I installed winXP in a VMware virtual machine. I remember that Antics, one of my animation programs, never could find the graphics card in either of those.

So, I have dual-boot capabilities, and from time-to-time find the need to boot into WinXP-32.

MIGRATION TO NEW COMPUTER
Incidentally, I found a bargain i7-940 ($225) and just couldn't resist - I'm building a new system. But based on what I've read, I'll be able to migrate all my programs over to the new hardware without re-installing them by using the Paragon Hard Disk Manager - people who've tried it seem satisfied; we'll see if it works for me.

I have been running dual boot for months. I did prove to Sony that the issue I was having with SD playback had nothing to do with reloading the system. Ran slow in Vista 32 and slow in Win 7 64. Unless there is a specific reason I wouldn't bother with dual boot.

One app that didn't work was PhotoArtMaster Gold. But then I tried "Run As Administrator" and it worked. That is strange as I have admin rights and it didn't run under my username.

I think that Win7 is Microsoft's best OS since Windows 2000. Apparently, there are a lot of other people that think so, too.

Here's a quote from Microsoft's Brandon LeBlanc:

"Today is earnings day and Windows continues to have a strong showing. We announced a new milestone in Windows 7 sales - 175 million copies. This continues our record breaking pace of more than 7 copies sold per second. And as of today – Windows 7 is now running on more than 16% of all PCs worldwide. It's exciting to see this kind of response from customers who have helped make Windows 7 the fastest selling operating system in history. We are also seeing some strong momentum with businesses for Windows 7. The PC “refresh cycle” for businesses has accelerated and we recorded the second straight quarter of double digital business license growth. And with Internet Explorer, IE8 is now the fastest growing and most popular web browser in the market and we have IE9 coming!"

If you buy the Proffessional version you can download 'XP mode' for free from MS which runs XP as a virtual machine and use it to run any applications that won't run on Win764. I use it for one program (not video) that didn't work on Win7 but that's all. You can even have a short cut on your Win7 desk top that launches the application including the XP mode. The Virtual Machine version of XP works flawlessly for me - much better than any 3rd party virtual machine apps I have tried. With this you really have no need for a dual boot to XP machine.

I have two apps that would not work with my Win 7, both hardware related.

Pinnacle Studio AV/DV capture (analog to DV AVI). No new driver available.

Kprobe2 (CD/DVD checker). Requires LiteOn IDE DVD writer. Won't work if a serial DVD writer is present as in my Win7 box.

As time goes by and we move to Blu-ray and beyond, I'll be able to put them both in mothballs.

I think that Win7 is Microsoft's best OS since Windows 2000

I'll second that for sure John - I have the same experience.

/Ulf

"If you buy the Proffessional version you can download 'XP mode' for free from MS which runs XP as a virtual machine and use it to run any applications that won't run on Win764"

Not so. As I mentioned above, I have several programs that would not run in XP mode - including my favorite animation program, Antics. It seems that programs that rely upon the GPU for hardware acceleration won't run in XP mode - my hypothesis for why they wouldn't run (Antics said "can't find graphics card" and quit)

I still use some older programs which contain portions of legacy 16bit code. I've never gotten them running properly on Win7/64.
I eventually decided it was better for me to keep an older machine around to run them, rather than dual-booting.

LReavis - did you change the default hardware setttings in XP mode to allow access to the GPU? I set mine to have full access to all my hardware, but don't remember if the GPU was an option that was available, wasn't important as I don't use any GPU accelleration programs.

I had to update the NVIDIA driver from the NVIDIA website after installing W7 64. The only app I have that uses GPU (Crazy Talk facial animation) wouldn't run properly, and CT support told me to do the update.