Well, it's time to throw in the towel.
     I'm all for moving ahead with technology, and having the 64-bit version of Vista seemed like a good way to help technology make the next step: the one they've been putting off for about a decade. Well, they can have it. The next step is across a very slippery stone.
     I didn't know the exact cause of why Lord of the Rings Online was acting so sluggish on my machine. I assumed it was some problem with the game, because so had a lot of people. But one evening a few days ago while I was working on my son's machine, I noticed that his dual core Pentium was running the game faster than my quad-core AMD. Well that narrowed down the problem a bit, and while I admit I did think that the AMD vs Intel could be the culprit, I figured the more likely and easier to test out problem would be in the 32 bit vs. 64 bit arena.
     I wasn't disappointed. The problem was in the OS. I'm sure there's more technical ways to describe it, but I look at it like a dam with 32 openings across it versus one with 64. Now by theory, if the openings are the same size, you should be able to move more water through them in the same amount of time. What happens with some programs (and I'm not blaming Windoze here. Really. Well... maybe a little.) is that if you put enough water behind it to move past the 64 openings, and then clog even a few of them, you can end up with a big backlog in no time.
     I'm a fairly patient person. I remember a time when you even had to wait for games on the Commodore 64 to load up. Some of the really good ones took about five to ten minutes. And checking an old 5 1/4 inch disk could take hours. I don't mind if my word processor takes a little bit of time, or even if I have to wait a bit on a web page to load. Firefox usually gives up before I would have. But when I'm in game mode, it's got to be smooth, it's got to be quick, and not only does choppy graphics upset my stomach, but it also makes me want to play something else.
     So I did a quick experiment and changed my machine over to the 32-bit version of Windows. For those number crunchers that might be wondering, I'm running a Phenom 2.3 GigHz with 5 gig of memory (KIngston if you're a real connesiour), and a 7200 rpm SATA Hard Drive (Seagate 400 gig). The video card is my weakest point, in my opinion, a KTX version of the GeForce 8600GT with 512 meg of memory. There's a few reasons I don't strongly recommend the brand, but that's not the subject for today.
    Highest graphics settings in the laggiest part of Lord of the Rings Online (West Bree), and the game hardly ever skipped a beat. I had worse stuttering in Ironforge near the auction house on a slightly slower machine in XP. So that made up my mind. I might have lost a few files in the change-over, but it was well worth it. That only left me with one other small problem: I'd need to switch over my wife's machine, and there's no way for me ever to know what she might really mind missing. Better to keep it all, and Vista won't do a 64x down to x86 "upgrade."
    I was smart though, see? I did a complete system backup first and then got the x86 version on the machine and went to restore the back-up (I'm not sure how I figured Windoze would know what would work in one environment versus the other, but it can be surprisingly smart at times. This wasn't one of those cases though.) Windoze said: "There's nothing on this disk." Oh crud! Nothing? As in, "This disk contains no data?" I just wiped the hard drive. Oh no. My wife is going to be livid.
    Now don't get the wrong impression here, my wife is a very nice person, and I have yet to find her limit with me. She's married to a crazy person and she knows it. But all her data? All of her homework for her pre-pharmacy classes? The house plans she likes to draw up? Her novel... oh that novel... the one that's she been working on for 10 years.... oh boy.... (I keep it backed up, but I was a little distraut when I was thinking this.)
     What did they say in those classes at VA? Yeah,  breathe deep. If you get dizzy it's... it's... whoa... dizzy... what do you do for dizzy? Is there a pill for that? Paper bag... something to do with a paper bag. Our kids are out of the brown paper bag for lunch stage, but that didn't stop me from looking all over the computer room for a brown paper bag. Nevermind that we kept them in the third drawer down to the left of the stove. Lucky we didn't have any, or I'd have tried to inhale it.
      But there is something I read in a newspaper article awhile back and my mind was just out of joint enough that it was able to make a huge irrational leap to safety. The article talked about how soldiers who suffered from PTSD often had to learn to forgive: their enemies, their friends that let them down, themselves for letting their friends down. A lot of stress that's part of PTSD comes from holding onto things that are better off let go. Maybe I'll do a blog on that sometime, because it's not all related to the stressful event.
      The thought of that triggered the jump in my mind that I talked about though. I knew my wife would be upset at me, but I also knew that she would forgive me. I even knew that it didn't warrant a cold night for me, just maybe a quieter one than usual. And that calmed me enough that a more rational thought was able to hit me. "Can an x86 version of the OS read an x64 OS's backup?" The answer is no. It can't.

How to do the actual transfer:
      And if someone was reading this blog hoping for an answer to how to covert an x64 Vista to an x86 Vista, I'm sorry. The answer is in the story though. It's just subtle. You're not going to get a stable copy of what you had on the first try. It's difficult at best to determine what programs load things differently, so you have to go through a slow process to get it back. (A Windoze Easy Transfer will fail right off. Won't even let you try) The best way is to get a small second drive. There's a little computer shop called Messik's Computers near here that I go to and he sells a 250gig SATA Seagate (7200 rpm) for $65. Backup the users directory and Program Data to the second drive. This is usually about 99% of what you need as personal stuff off the drive. I'm assuming here that you know enough to be able to see the hidden files. Turning that and the stupid "hide known extensions" options off are among the first things I do on a new install.
      Next, do a complete PC backup to your extra drive. When that's complete, change the folder name by adding an .x64 to the end, so you know it's a backup of the x64 system. Blast your OS hard drive and then install the x86 version. When it's done installing, and after you've moved over your documents and pictures etc, do a complete PC backup again. Relabel the backup so you know which version it is. Windoze will nicely correct you if you get it wrong, but it's a little faster and less strenuous this way.
     Ok, now you're ready to start re-installing all your apps. If moving app data or program data over from the backup makes things unstable, change the last backups name, and then do a restore. The restore option comes from the install disk. Instead of installing, take the repair option and give it a moment to figure itself out, then it will give you an option to restore a complete PC backup.
     It's a little more tricky if you forgot to move some data over from the old install, but not too bad. First off, do a complete PC backup of your stable x86 installation, remove the .x86 extention you added, and then format the drive. Since Windows is sometimes hesitant to allow you to delete the OS drive, ou can do this by starting the x86 version of the install, formatting the hard drive and then aborting and running the x64 install. The reason for this awkward switching is because the x64 doesn't want to even think about installing on an x86 installation, you have to clear it first. and not only that, but the x86 version won't do an x64 restore.
     From there it's just a matter of moving over the data you need. You don't need to take another x64 backup, so just do the format using the x64 install and then abort and switch etc... Good luck, but I hope you never need to do this. Maybe in a few years though it will be helpful for doing the reverse and maybe by then Windoze 7 will have a real backup utility.