Windows 10 backup- upgrading 32 bit to 64 bit architecture

[Toxic_Avenger]

I've been having a computer issue where I'm running out of RAM (programs hang, memory usage is up to 75% of available memory under normal usage). I've run the usual virus scans, malware etc, so I don't think that any of that is at play.

One thing I have noticed is I'm running a 32 bit OS on a PC which is capable of 64 bit architecture. For some reason the windows 8 to windows 10 upgrade mid last year has caused this. As I understand, upgrading to x64 windows would allow me to use the full RAM that is installed in this PC, and help my performance issues to some extent. I believe 32 bit architecture can only utilise 4Gb of memory, whereas 64 bit can utilise much more (I have 8Gb RAM installed on the board).

Main question
When it comes to backing up the PC 'as is' (programs, applications, files etc), what is the best way to do this?
I have multiple users on this PC, and I have administrator rights, but want to ensure that ALL data on the PC for ALL users is preserved when I download the x64 OS, and load the backup.

Any thoughts, ideas or experiences?

[stewie110]

I've been having a computer issue where I'm running out of RAM (programs hang, memory usage is up to 75% of available memory under normal usage). I've run the usual virus scans, malware etc, so I don't think that any of that is at play.

One thing I have noticed is I'm running a 32 bit OS on a PC which is capable of 64 bit architecture. For some reason the windows 8 to windows 10 upgrade mid last year has caused this. As I understand, upgrading to x64 windows would allow me to use the full RAM that is installed in this PC, and help my performance issues to some extent. I believe 32 bit architecture can only utilise 4Gb of memory, whereas 64 bit can utilise much more (I have 8Gb RAM installed on the board).

Main question
When it comes to backing up the PC 'as is' (programs, applications, files etc), what is the best way to do this?
I have multiple users on this PC, and I have administrator rights, but want to ensure that ALL data on the PC for ALL users is preserved when I download the x64 OS, and load the backup.

Any thoughts, ideas or experiences?
Windows supports pae if it is enabled. It will allow you to use nearly all of the available ram. However the maximum ram usable per process (app) tends to be around 3gb. In task manager is the biggest app running in the 3gb range?

[Toxic_Avenger]

Biggest app would be firefox at approx 1Gb.

[incisor]

Just be aware that running 32bit apps on an x64 requires the os to load the approx 1g emulator...

[Pedro_The_Swift]

a quick look here--
How to Switch From 32-bit Windows 10 to 64-bit Windows 10 (http://www.howtogeek.com/228042/how-to-switch-from-32-bit-windows-10-to-64-bit-windows-10/)

[Toxic_Avenger]

I've been reading those how to geek articles.
From what I understand the backup side of the situation can be done wtih a system image which is basically a copy of the hard disk drives as a backup. So doing that now and it will run its course thru the day.
I'm hoping the system restore will not load any 32 bit drivers on top of the 64 bit drivers that were installed with the X64 OS?

I'm also led to believe that there is no real disadvantage of going to 64 bit over 32 if your PC is capable of doing so. So I guess I'll work on getting the OS up to speed with the hardware and see where it goes from there.

Wish me luck. This computer pixie wrangling sure is a test on the old grey matter, even for a young chap!

[cafe latte]

I've been reading those how to geek articles.
From what I understand the backup side of the situation can be done wtih a system image which is basically a copy of the hard disk drives as a backup. So doing that now and it will run its course thru the day.
I'm hoping the system restore will not load any 32 bit drivers on top of the 64 bit drivers that were installed with the X64 OS?

I'm also led to believe that there is no real disadvantage of going to 64 bit over 32 if your PC is capable of doing so. So I guess I'll work on getting the OS up to speed with the hardware and see where it goes from there.

Wish me luck. This computer pixie wrangling sure is a test on the old grey matter, even for a young chap!

One way to make the computer much faster is back up all the files you need and get rid of windows and install Linux mint. Windows is very memory hungry indeed, but Linux isnt. If you are a gamer or something Linux isnt ideal, but for accounts, surfing the net, emails, forums, watching movies or youtube and listening to music etc, probably what most here use the computer for Linux is hard to beat. Oh and free too..
Chris

[incisor]

I'm also led to believe that there is no real disadvantage of going to 64 bit over 32 if your PC is capable of doing so.

ie your computer has more than 4gig of ram

x64 will run in 4g but you are back to less than 3g because of the 32bit emulator so gain nothing at best.

[Pedro_The_Swift]

or stick more ram in it,,;)

[incisor]

or stick more ram in it,,;)

i would if i could but i ram out of slots @24g :p

[stewie110]

I've been reading those how to geek articles.
From what I understand the backup side of the situation can be done wtih a system image which is basically a copy of the hard disk drives as a backup. So doing that now and it will run its course thru the day.
I'm hoping the system restore will not load any 32 bit drivers on top of the 64 bit drivers that were installed with the X64 OS?

I'm also led to believe that there is no real disadvantage of going to 64 bit over 32 if your PC is capable of doing so. So I guess I'll work on getting the OS up to speed with the hardware and see where it goes from there.

Wish me luck. This computer pixie wrangling sure is a test on the old grey matter, even for a young chap!

A few things to try before you embark on your journey of x86 -> x64. (32bit to 64bit).
* Delete all your temp files
* clear out your cache in your browser (if it is the browser that is slowing down).
* de-fragment your hard drive
* reboot

See if you still have performance problems or issues. If they still exist are they still as severe or are they reduced?...


What are the symptoms when you see the slow down? are they always in the same program, or are they random?

What version of windows are you using? (Windows 10 Home, Premium, Pro, Windows 8 etc).

[Ferret]

I loaded win10 x64 on a laptop with 2G of ram to see what happens. Works, but runs like a disabled dog.:D

[Toxic_Avenger]

One way to make the computer much faster is back up all the files you need and get rid of windows and install Linux mint. Windows is very memory hungry indeed, but Linux isnt. If you are a gamer or something Linux isnt ideal, but for accounts, surfing the net, emails, forums, watching movies or youtube and listening to music etc, probably what most here use the computer for Linux is hard to beat. Oh and free too..
Chris
I dabbled in Linux many years back. Debian, Ubuntu, Red hat, and even a short lived stint on slackware (my bash skills were limited).


ie your computer has more than 4gig of ram

x64 will run in 4g but you are back to less than 3g because of the 32bit emulator so gain nothing at best.

This is what's confusing. I have 8gb installed. Running X86 (32 bit) OS on a X64 chipset (intel pentium G3258). OS is Windows 10 pro build 1511 (Build 10586.318). The about system page shows 8Gb installed ram, 3.47 usable.


i would if i could but i ram out of slots @24g :p
I wish I had that problem!


A few things to try before you embark on your journey of x86 -> x64. (32bit to 64bit).
* Delete all your temp files
* clear out your cache in your browser (if it is the browser that is slowing down).
* de-fragment your hard drive
* reboot

See if you still have performance problems or issues. If they still exist are they still as severe or are they reduced?...


What are the symptoms when you see the slow down? are they always in the same program, or are they random?

What version of windows are you using? (Windows 10 Home, Premium, Pro, Windows 8 etc).

Great info, I'll give that a crack and report back. I've got the backup done and ready to pull the pin when needed...
Cheers!

[stewie110]

I dabbled in Linux many years back. Debian, Ubuntu, Red hat, and even a short lived stint on slackware (my bash skills were limited).



This is what's confusing. I have 8gb installed. Running X86 (32 bit) OS on a X64 chipset (intel pentium G3258). OS is Windows 10 pro build 1511 (Build 10586.318). The about system page shows 8Gb installed ram, 3.47 usable.


I wish I had that problem!



Great info, I'll give that a crack and report back. I've got the backup done and ready to pull the pin when needed...
Cheers!
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/hardware/ff542275(v=vs.85).aspx enable pae

[cafe latte]

I dabbled in Linux many years back. Debian, Ubuntu, Red hat, and even a short lived stint on slackware (my bash skills were limited).



This is what's confusing. I have 8gb installed. Running X86 (32 bit) OS on a X64 chipset (intel pentium G3258). OS is Windows 10 pro build 1511 (Build 10586.318). The about system page shows 8Gb installed ram, 3.47 usable.


I wish I had that problem!



Great info, I'll give that a crack and report back. I've got the backup done and ready to pull the pin when needed...
Cheers!

I visited Linux years ago too and it was terrible, it is very different now.
Chris

[sheerluck]

I loaded win10 x64 on a laptop with 2G of ram to see what happens. Works, but runs like a disabled dog.:D

I can imagine it was a bit slow. :D

Saying that, I've got a 4gb HP convertible laptop running Win10 x64 with a WinXP VM and a Win7 VM and only the WinXP VM runs badly.

[vnx205]

I dabbled in Linux many years back. Debian, Ubuntu, Red hat, and even a short lived stint on slackware (my bash skills were limited).
Cheers!

Expecting Linux today to be the same as Linix many years back is a bit like thinking a D4 will be the same as a Series Land Rover from many years back.
:p

[cafe latte]

Expecting Linux today to be the same as Linix many years back is a bit like thinking a D4 will be the same as a Series Land Rover from many years back.
:p

Agreed, early Linux was a train wreck, but now it has moved on a long way. A couple of years back in all the computer mags it was getting good reviews, some mags voting the new Mint to be the best operating system bar non. Not everyone will agree, but whatever it is today it really is very good indeed.
Chris

[sheerluck]

I gave Linux in various versions a good go about 10 years back. It was great in certain applications, but for mainstream use I found it to be too finicky.

Have been dabbling again recently, doing a fair bit with Raspbian, and yes it's come on a long way.

[incisor]

linux still has a long way to go to get to the usability of the mainstream OS's but it definitely is a lot more user friendly than it used to be.

mint and ubuntu are both great for home users with limited needs, a sense of adventure and the patience to play with it..

still prefer debian myself if i have to play in *nix

solaris or freebsd for business grade stuff.

but my old laptop with snow leopard flogs them all and has for years

surely it's gotta die one day so i can shout myself a new one :p

[stewie110]

linux still has a long way to go to get to the usability of the mainstream OS's but it definitely is a lot more user friendly than it used to be.

mint and ubuntu are both great for home users with limited needs, a sense of adventure and the patience to play with it..

still prefer debian myself if i have to play in *nix

solaris or freebsd for business grade stuff.

but my old laptop with snow leopard flogs them all and has for years

surely it's gotta die one day so i can shout myself a new one :p

It depends what your "business grade" is. Server Operating systems are tools to do tasks and run business software. Most "internet" software is written for Linux first *nix, *bsd later. Its become that way because it has the largest deployment base, the largest user base, the most varied user base of all the *nix and *nix like systems (bsd, osx). It tends to be much easier as a developer to focus on the largest user base, then when users come looking for support on other operating systems there is enough momentum to support it.

It has not always been that way, If we go back to the 1990's Solaris was the premier UNIX (Solaris was actually originally BSD based and changed to SysV (UNIX) around the early 90s) and FreeBSD was king of the open source crowd. FreeBSD fragmented [1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DragonFly_BSD)] massively towards the end of the 4.x -> 5.0 streams, some key developers left the community to work exclusively for Apple [1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Hubbard)]. It's multi-core and filesystem reliability was absolutely shocking in early 5.x releases and was only marked -STABLE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_FreeBSD) in 5.3. The poor multi-threaded performance and the new dual core CPU's put a large dent into the FreeBSD community as many users jumped platforms to Linux. With many large organisations (http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/announcements/2015/02/linux-foundation-releases-linux-development-report) backing the project (Linux) it has grown in stability and performance.

As with any OS you need to pick your hardware to match your software, there are always fly by night organisations selling cheap fab crap out of China which is unreliable and has poor or no driver support. This is a key point on Linux desktop adoption. So many "consumer grade" computing systems have shocking driver support and that shows up on Linux, FreeBSD et al.

Disclaimer: I've been using Linux as my primary desktop operating system since 2003. I have been at various times a contributor to projects including MySQL, Slackware, Ubuntu, FreeBSD and Squid. I have developed software since the early 1990s on Linux, Free and NetBSD, SunOS, Solaris, OSX. In that time all my Linux desktop systems have been full intel hardware to avoid driver pain-in-the-arse. Having said thta my work supplied system is a recent macbook pro. While OSX has some nice features it's a poor substitute to Linux as a dev environment. The simple reason is there are all sorts of edge case bugs that arise in OSX that I don't see on Linux (different threading implementations, schedulers, c libs, compilers, the list goes on and on and on). Again the entire tool chain for open source software is generally developed with Linux first all the rest second.. and it shows.
I should also point out that I don't play music or do any photo/video editing on Linux. It's my toolbox that I work in KDE, Browser (Chromium, Firefox) Editor, Shell, Compilers etc. I've occasionally looked over the fence at GNOME/Unity and cringe.

The key point is that there is the right tool for particular people's jobs. There is no such thing as one size fits all in life, and computing. This thread has also gone WAYYYYY off Topic.

[vnx205]

... ..... ....

The key point is that there is the right tool for particular people's jobs. There is no such thing as one size fits all in life, and computing. This thread has also gone WAYYYYY off Topic.

It is on topic in one respect because some of the problems that some people have with their computer's performance could be solved by ditching Windows and installing Linux. It might have solved the original problem.

As you say, it isn't for everyone, but I believe that a huge percentage of the people who would benefit most from it are people who have never heard of Linux.

[cafe latte]

It is on topic in one respect because some of the problems that some people have with their computer's performance could be solved by ditching Windows and installing Linux. It might have solved the original problem.

As you say, it isn't for everyone, but I believe that a huge percentage of the people who would benefit most from it are people who have never heard of Linux.

I cant agree more strongly. Windows is good, but it is also a pain in the butt and there is always a new problem that is going to need a new expensive program to fix, not so with Linux. A lot of people need to ask what they actually use their computer for. 90 odd perecent of people just surf the net, youtube, facebook, forums, play music and watch vids and maybe do accounts too. Linux does all this and a lot more trouble free. Oh and for free. If you are a gamer, maybe other options are better, but otherwise I think a lotof peoples problems with computers could be solved by ditching windows, so this is very on topic.
Chris

[stewie110]

I cant agree more strongly. Windows is good, but it is also a pain in the butt and there is always a new problem that is going to need a new expensive program to fix, not so with Linux. A lot of people need to ask what they actually use their computer for. 90 odd perecent of people just surf the net, youtube, facebook, forums, play music and watch vids and maybe do accounts too. Linux does all this and a lot more trouble free. Oh and for free. If you are a gamer, maybe other options are better, but otherwise I think a lotof peoples problems with computers could be solved by ditching windows, so this is very on topic.
Chris

Original question.. How to backup Windows so that the system can be upgraded to 64bit... Current thread/topic conversation is about Linux..
The threads topic has evolved. But it IS still off the topic of the thread defined by the subject and the original post/question.

I agree with both your points. I am a massive Linux fan etc.. right tool etc etc..

[incisor]

Disclaimer: I've been using Linux as my primary desktop operating system since 2003.

I made my first pc $ selling a program i spent 2 years writing for an atari 8bit before i ran a multi-line bbs on that hardware using spartados etc.

i have been playing linux since the days of yggdrasil and was a debian consultant for many a year before moving into bsd and freebsd. i was a real fan until it became clear that it had some very serious limitations in the real world espcially when it came to trying to make a living after i was forced to give away my trade.

no only was it my desktop of choice but i also ran many of my servers etc on it when i was an isp.

aulro.com started out on debian on a pc under my desk at home, progressed to freebsd and has run on solaris ever since. so long in fact i have forgotten more than i remember about many bits of it.

having been a pc consultant since the late 80's (i got over programming early on) and having seen the evolution of the pc environment at the coal face, shall we say, the linux user experience for the average joe, just hasn't been that flash.

sure it has surges in popularity but never to the point that it has been a serious contender in the pc market place as many manufactures have found out first hand.

i tried numerous times over the years to get people to try linux and out of the hundreds i have introduced to it, there is less than a handful still persisting with it i believe.

it's more of an enthusiasts os more than something you can point a pc dummy at and get them to persist with.. the ease and popularity of windows or mac os always lures them away one way or another.

come to think of it, i think my most successful linux convert would be old dave the original owner of the neurum creek bush retreat....

the one thing i always noticed tho is that it always had a very high proportion of zealots in it's userbase, which will help perpetuate the dream...

i used to cop so much crap from windows guys when i pushed linux etc, they would have a big smile and an even bigger told you so on their dials now....

sadly the pc market and user base is shrinking at an alarming rate so it will be interesting to see where the next few years takes us...

[cafe latte]

Original question.. How to backup Windows so that the system can be upgraded to 64bit... Current thread/topic conversation is about Linux..
The threads topic has evolved. But it IS still off the topic of the thread defined by the subject and the original post/question.

I agree with both your points. I am a massive Linux fan etc.. right tool etc etc..

Yes but it is related, the question my car is loosing oil where do I put oil in. One answer is fix the reason you are loosing oil. Not wanting to go off topic, but if someone is having windows issues, fixing them is one solution , trying another operation system is another, both are valid answers. I got fed up with just this type of problem with Windows and it is why I tried Linux again. Anyone who has Windows big issues I would advise to install Linux side by side and try it for a while. Many would be surprised IMO. My point is why try fix something that is broken (home use anyway), if it is not doing what you want try something else it is even free.
Chris

[Toxic_Avenger]

I'm not bothered with where the conversation is heading, as it's all good reading.
My problem still persists after all the advice above (bar the 'Boot Parameters to Configure DEP and PAE' fix- I'll get to that on the weekend)... but really appreciate all the help so far!

[cafe latte]

I'm not bothered with where the conversation is heading, as it's all good reading.
My problem still persists after all the advice above (bar the 'Boot Parameters to Configure DEP and PAE' fix- I'll get to that on the weekend)... but really appreciate all the help so far!

Mitch, I cant help with Widows, but try loading Linux side by side on your computer. How to do is online. If you dont like it you loose nothing and all is back to normal, if it works for you reinstal and wipe windows.
What do you do on your computer?
Chris

[incisor]

if it is still slow try doing the cleanup procedure i have listed in the computer area.

if it is still slow after that run something like Victoria HDD test (http://www.majorgeeks.com/files/details/victoria_for_windows.html)

after it loads select the hdd to test, go to the test tab and click start and let it run it's course.

it will tell you how many slow sectors and or bad sectors you have

another reason for the slowdown can be power, make sure your power supply is putting out over 12v and 5v on the different rails with a multi meter. they are DC voltages on the output side of the power supply.

[Toxic_Avenger]

Hi Chris, thanks for the suggestion. I've dual booted windows / linux in the past, but well out of practice these days.

Mainly I just browse the internet, a bit of social media, internet shopping... the usual.

[cafe latte]

Hi Chris, thanks for the suggestion. I've dual booted windows / linux in the past, but well out of practice these days.

Mainly I just browse the internet, a bit of social media, internet shopping... the usual.

All the more reason to give Linux another go then. You need to google how to load Linux on a windows 7 and 10 computer as there is a special procedure as windows blocks the install, I cant think why :wasntme:
It took me a few weeks to get the correct programes from the software center to do everything I wanted, but now everything works as before. I set up another computer recently for someone on Linux and it seems on later incarnations media players and other important stuff are already on the operationg system so set up now should be even easier. Printers and other hardware are actually easier than on windows IMO, as you just connect and the computer does the rest.
Chris