Upgrade Windows 10 32bit To 64bit

[Prisc Chandola]

Wehave a couple of vm servers still running Windows Server 2003 R2 Enterprise 32bit.There are many vulnerabilities and some of the ways of fixing the problem will be upgrading to a higher version of Windows Server and IIS.(Plus Microsoft stopped supporting Server 2003.)

In addition, this would be like trying to upgrade Windows XP to Vista, to Win 7, to Win 8, to Win 10. I highly doubt you would attempt that on a home computer, so why consider it for a production server?

I have read a lot of conflicting opinions on whether or not it is possible to upgrade without re-installing my programs. Does anyone have any first hand experience with this? If I can't go directly from XP32 to Windows 7 64, maybe I can go from XP32 to XP64 and then to Windows 7 64bit?

it is not at all possible to upgrade any 32 bit operating system to any 64 bit operating system. the only way such an upgrade can be preformed is through a fresh install which would not transfer the software and files you need.

I suggest that you buy another hard drive, install it, and then put windows 7 64bit onto that hard drive and set up a dual boot, which is probably the best solution. even if you could upgrade from 32 bit directly to 64 bit most, if not all, of your software would need to be reinstalled into 64 bit format.

You're going to have to reinstall. Win 7 doesn't support upgrading from XP, and XP64 is an entirely different beast than XP. You can't upgrade to that either. What's more, unless you have a very specific use case that requires it, there's no reason to run XP64 at all. Driver support was atrocious for consumer hardware.

As others have stated, you'll need to re-install to accomplish this. And therefore, you might as well go to Windows 7.Unless you have programs that won't run in Windows 7, you'll be happy you did. And even then, you can probably find alternatives. Windows 7 is far superior to Windows XP. Vista and 8 are wait for the next version OSes, but 7 got it right.

One suggestion would be to use a Physical to Virtual converter. You can convert your current computer into a Virtual Machine that you could then run in VirtualBox.Your Virtual Guest will still be limited to Cross- architecture upgrades, i.e. 32 bit to 64 bit and vive versa, are definitely not supported (see Windows Server 2008 R2 Upgrade Paths Microsoft Learn for supported upgrade paths), and as far as I know, they are not even possible, since we are talking about different architectures.

The sever is less then 3 yrs old and would like to stay with same windows since we already have the media and the key for it. Yeah the backup and reinstall is the option that I can do. But was wondering if there are other options.

Before you do anything along these lines, you need to make full disk image back and a file data backup of your machine, so you have a way to go back if things go wrong. Be sure you create a bootable Windows Recovery disk/USB and the bootable Rescue disk/USB for the backup s/w. Be sure they boot.

Upgrading from the 32-bit version to the 64-bit version of Windows requires that you reformat your hard disk, install the 64-bit version of Windows, and then reinstall everything else that you had on your device.

You will also need the license keys for all your third-party software, since you have to reinstall. 32-bit software will work on a 64-bit OS.

With 64-bit OS, you would benefit from more than 4GB RAM. 8GB is almost minimum, but the amount will be dictated by the hardware maximum. You should also check ahead of time if there are 64-bit drivers for the other hardware. Use Device Manager and something like Belarc Advisor, Speccy, or msinfo32.exe to help. Then check with the computer OEM or device OEM for the drivers.

Your CPU is compatible with 64 bit windows, but most instructions say that to switch you need to clean install windows, this is an annoying process requiring recopying your data and reinstalling and finding keys for software.

I have a 15 year old Sony Vaio, original OS was Vista. I number of year ago I added Linux Mint (32bit) in dual boot. I have not booted into Vista since doing this. The machine was slow on Linux Mint, but not painfully so. When 32 bit versions of Mint were halted I switched to 64 bit Linux Lite. Now the machine IS painfully slow. Could this be due to the Linux OS being 64bit instead of 32bit?

64-bit software, for the same program, is usually similar in speed to 32-bit, however it uses much more memory. Since the machine probably does not have an excess of memory, swapping to disk may be happening more which is (with non-SSD) hundreds of times slower than in RAM memory access. Although the computer may have an old hard drive interface such as PATA instead of SATA, you might be able to add more ram and a PATA SSD hard drive. However, some distros by their nature are faster or slower than others.

Would the latest php 64bit be expected to have slightly better performance and reliability over the latest 32bit version in this case? Would anyone recommend upgrading to the latest 5.5 or 5.6 version instead?

Windows calls the php5 64bit versions 'experimental', saying '..do not provide 64-bit integer or large file support..'. Is that concern relevant to moodle? If moodle works on php5 32bit I'm guessing these 2 concerns are not needed by moodle?

64-bit PHP in versions 5.6 and below is not fully supported, therefore always mentioned as Experimental. But Latest addition of PHP 7 has brought full 64-bit support in windows platform as well, so unless you are planning to upgrade to PHP 7, there is no need to upgrade/change to PHP 64-bit.

Now regarding performance, PHP 7 has really pumped up PHP performance on both Linux/Windows platforms, in addition to large integer support in 64-bit, so large file support is now not a problem with PHP 7 on Windows platform. BUT, so far only Moodle version 3.0.1+ are tested and certified on PHP 7.

Therefore if you are not on Moodle 3.0.1+ then keeping on PHP 5.x 32-bit will be OK, as long as you are not getting Large course backups/imports issues, as they can only be supported by fully supported 64-bit PHP.

If, you want to see performance boost while on PHP 32-bit, then either turn on OpCache (comes native to PHP 5.5 and 5.6) if you haven't done already, else use WinCache latest versions for PHP 5.x or a combination of both while disabling opCache in WinCache.

Thanks Usman, guess i'll just upgrade my 32bit version unless there may be a benefit with our larger backups. Would you consider a course backup large if its 300-500mb in size? Backups definitely push our system.

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