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Purchased a Toshiba satellite L650 sometime in November 2009. It came with 4 GB RAM (not enough key bounce while I posted first, oops :-( ), 284 GB HDD, DVD drive and 2 USB ports, 1 sATA/USB port and all the usual slots.

It came pre-installed with Windows 7 Home Premium. When I activated the machine, I was asked to choose 32 bit or 64 bit version. Not having access to the Net to make an informed choice, I decided to choose 32-bit for safety's sake. I've since regretted it, for it left 1GB RAM virtually unusable on the machine!

Two questions for the forum:

  1. For that laptop, is it possible to use the recovery media creator and roll back to a 64 bit Win 7 Home Premium OS on the machine ?

  2. The existing HDD is 284GB capacity, and it is showing signs of age. I think it needs to be replaced (soonish, I might add). I am thinking of buying a 1 TB laptop HDD to replace the existing one. Is it possible to use the Toshiba recovery software creator to reinstall the Win 7 Home Premium OS (64 bit) on the new HDD? Or should I use some kind of disk mirroring software (Macrium, Paragon, etc) to mirror the previous HDD on the new one?

EDIT 2a: I should have mentioned this. I have made a media recovery creator on a 16 GB USB pen drive. And yes, my laptop is USB bootable.

EDIT: I typed my title last, and I got a few "possible" threads based on my title keywords. I am also looking at those right now. So, If this thread is already discussed and I missed it, please direct me to the thread.

Thanks.

Surio
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1 Answers1

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Is using this Recovery Media Creator a necessity? I'd suggest you just save your important files to an external HDD, then pop in the new one, install Win7 Home Premium x64 untouched from here, activate using the key from the COA sticker on the laptop's bottom and copy your files back. (If the sticker's missing or faded, use ProduKey to first recover your current installation's key.)

Alternately just install Win7 on the new HDD, activate, then copy your files directly from the old HDD which you've placed into a USB enclosure.

Imaging your existing installation is not recommended in this case since upgrading from the 32 to 64-bit version of Windows is not possible and requires a fresh install of all your apps anyway.

You can choose to keep the Recovery Media Creator and recovery partition around on the old HDD, but I don't really see the advantage of doing so. After you've installed an untouched copy of Win7 (that'll lack any crapware Toshiba includes) and all your apps, you can then image your new HDD to an external drive as part of your backup strategy.

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Karan
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