I am upgrading to Windows 7. I have a question about my game drive.

[Serradifalco]

Hello fellow Anandtechers. I will be upgrading to Windows 7 Ultimate from Windows Vista Ultimate. I have all of our games on their own hard drive. Do I need to re-install the games after the upgrade or can we still play them under the new os? I originally put the games on a separate hard drive so I wouldn't have to re-install them every time I upgraded the computer. I never thought about how that would work if I upgraded the os. Thanks.

 

[mpilchfamily]

For the most part you will need to reinstall the games. Most games, while installed on another drive still have to store some information within the OS. Some games don't but for the most part they do register themselves with the OS. There are registry entries and .dll files that will be missing that will cause problems if you try to run the games with out reinstalling.

 

[Serradifalco]

For the most part you will need to reinstall the games. Most games, while installed on another drive still have to store some information within the OS. Some games don't but for the most part they do register themselves with the OS. There are registry entries and .dll files that will be missing that will cause problems if you try to run the games with out reinstalling.

Makes sense. Well, I guess I won't be upgrading from Windows 7 any time soon so the re-install will carry us for a few more years. You probably feel my pain, but re-installing all those games is time-cosuming. Not to mention all the games we have on Steam. I am not looking forward to this. I have to install Windows 7, Office 2007 and all the games with updates.🙁 Good thing I have the day off from work.

I do have one more question. What is the best way for me to clean the hard drives? I never did it in the past. I just went in under the Windows install and deleted the partition.

 

[Gunbuster]

Wow hard life, might have to install a few things.

Now Steam thats a killer, clicking a few times and coming back in the morning is super time consuming. 🙄

 

[Serradifalco]

Wow hard life, might have to install a few things.

Now Steam thats a killer, clicking a few times and coming back in the morning is super time consuming. 🙄

I know.... you know how every simple, mundane project goes. The other day I opend my case to install a new dvd burner and I noticed there was some dust on one of the fans. Well, I unscrewed the fan and cleaned it, then I figured, well, might as well clean the other fans. I then noticed the gpus had some dust on them, so off they came along with the cpu cooler, the front of the case, so on and so on... It was't very fun stuff, but after all it is very easy to swap out a dvd burner!

 

[DyslexicHobo]

I could be wrong, but I thought that if you were upgrading from Vista to Windows 7 you could upgrade without reformatting. Avoid formatting would keep your registry intact so you didn't have to reinstall all of your programs, no?

 

[0roo0roo]

steam gives the option of backing up the game files so you don'tn have to redownload everything.
use it

 

[Lean L]

steam games transfer over easily. you don't even need to download steam again, just go to the steam folder and launch steam... it'll update itself and create the proper registries like adware. don't redownload

 

[Lean L]

Wow hard life, might have to install a few things.

Now Steam thats a killer, clicking a few times and coming back in the morning is super time consuming. 🙄

yes it is time consuming. If you try to simul download games there is a huge pause in between that could take upwards of 15 minutes in which it is "preparing files", you cannot start another download at this time... this means if you have 20 games yo download it's gonna take a long time. Plus bandwidth caps seem to be the big thing now, redownloading 200GBs just might put you over the limit.