This is probably going to be one of my shortest posts.

When I first installed Windows 7, I was initially worried about the compatibility problems that I may have if I had installed the 64 bit version just like I had with WinXP 64-bit. Many software didn’t have a 64-bit version, and still don’t. However after about a year, I’ve seen almost no difference in terms of compatibility between Win7 32-bit and Win7 64-bit.

Further, recently my PC started acting really strangely – it would hang or freeze at random times and I couldn’t pinpoint it at all.

Also, I have been running Windows 7 for over a year now. It’s about the right time for a full reformat anyway.

Since I have my C: drive as a standalone partition, wiping it out and reformatting it is not much of a problem. My data (ie documents, pictures, savegames etc) is safely tucked away in other partitions. Also, having a NAS helps somewhat too, since all your stuff are actually not on the PC but on a network drive somewhere.

Thus I decided now would be a good time to reformat and go up to 64-bit.

Long story short, after booting up Win7 64-bit for the first time, the weird problems of hanging and freezing persisted. Thus it couldn’t be a software problem, had to be hardware-related. I spent a day thinking about this, wondering what I needed to swap out/upgrade. I even began looking at prices for CPUs (the chip, not the computer case), motherboards, RAMs etc.

Eventually I narrowed it down to my old 5-year-old 250GB harddisk. I wish I had installed a SMART monitor for the harddisk. I had enabled SMART in the BIOS but didn’t follow up by installing a monitor for it, so when the harddisk started to fail I was unaware. Anyway now I do, so the same thing shouldn’t happen again, I hope!

You know what I hate about reformatting?

After the reformat I would have to re-install EVERYTHING.. my Firefox, my Thunderbird, my games, etc. One saving grace is Steam – whatever games I had installed under Steam is all right back when I re-installed the Steam client.