[geeks] Windows 64-bit insanity

[nate at portents.com]

> On May 13, 2009, at 7:58 PM, velociraptor <velociraptor at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 8:03 AM,  <nate at portents.com> wrote:
>>>>> People actually do in-place upgrades of Windows?
>>>>
>>>> Yes.
>>>
>>> I would have tried out the in-place upgrade at home if I had the
>>> option,
>>> since I have 492GB of installed applications.  I can't begin to
>>> calculate
>>
>> OK, I'm going to trot that tidbit out the next time hubby accuses *me*
>> of being an application pack-rat. :-)  Do we even want to know what
>> kind of apps take up 492GB?!?
>
> I think he went to TUCOWS and took the "install everything" option ;^)

Heh... not quite.  I spend far too much of my money on games that I really
don't have nearly as much time to play as I think I will (shelves and
shelves of them) but I like to try to, so I have most of them installed. 
I had about 80 or so games installed in XP, and modern games can take up a
lot of space, so I've dedicated a 1TB drive to them.

Some tips that you won't find anywhere else:

- Valve's Steam digital distribution system and it's installed software
has demonstrated itself to be portable between operation systems.  I
installed a new Steam client in Windows 7 over the same install path as my
old Steam client (which stores all games and game settings within it's own
folder hierarchy underneath it), and it recognized and allowed me to
launch and update all my Steam games without re-installing them.  While
this will leave you with no Start menu shortcuts for the games (or record
in the registry that the programs are installed), no game I tested showed
any reliance on the registry for anything, which may in fact be a function
of the Steam API and the requirements it must place on games to be
distributed within it.  Considering that you have to launch Steam to
launch a game that has been installed by Steam, re-using my old Steam
install like this seems totally acceptible to me (and you can remove an
installed game from within Steam as well).

- Stardock's Impulse digital distribution system (successor to Stardock
Central) has a bug at least in Windows 7 where if you leave Impulse on the
default custom window theme the "Restore Archive" menu option will not
bring up an open dialog (or an error), so make sure you turn off the
custom window theme, however, it should also be noted that Impulse's
"Archive" option for installed software will not allow you to archive an
application in Windows XP and then restore it in Windows 7, i.e. Impulse
will complain that the OS versions don't match and fail to proceed.  I was
also unable to get Impulse to recognize games I had previously installed
in XP with it in 7, and in one case had to re-authorize a game even after
re-installing it, however from what I can tell the requirements that
Impulse puts on games distributed with it are far lower than Steam (and
clearly installed software portability was not a design goal in any way).

What I'm really not looking forward to is sorting out all the updates,
patches, mods and add-ons to all the other games... especially things like
Oblivion, where I was using a third-party mod manager to handle all the
mods and their patching, and if I don't re-create the correct set of mods
I was using I could invalidate my save game because the world state won't
be compatible.

A few dozen hours into this process, and probably several hundred more
before everything is set back up again...

- Nate