I recently switched from Windows XP to Windows 7. This was a big switch for me, since I had avoided Vista, so I went pretty much from an 8 year old 32 bit operating system, to the newest 64 bit OS from Microsoft. As you can imagine, it has been a learning experience.

My main reason for the switch was to get more memory. Some of my applications – Photoshop and 3ds Max in particular; use massive amounts of memory. I was living under the 32-bit OS limitation, which meant about 3.4GB of usable memory. This was not enough. Switching to 64 bit Win 7 has allowed me to expand the system RAM to 16 GB.

The transition has not been very smooth, though I don’t blame Windows 7 for that. Since I never bothered with Vista, I have skipped a step and am learning the changes of two versions simultaneously. So it’s mostly my own inexperience.

I plan to blog a few of the problems I encountered. Perhaps they’ll help someone else going through the same thing, or other people might have suggestions or advice for me.