Defrag: 32bit apps on 64bit OS, App Compat, Upgrading to Win8

Regards the 32-bit/64-bit thing - lots of sysinternals tools do in fact require running the 64-bit version - for example procexp and procmon come to mind, as well as other utilities that require loading temporary drivers into Windows.

The reason you probably haven't noticed is that the 32-bit version of these detects that it's running in WOW64, and so silently drops the 64-bit procexp64 or procmon64 to disk and launches that as 64-bit.

This means that although many sysinternals tools aren't really 64/32-bit agnostic, they pretend to be in a way that is pretty clever.

Just for you to know, I'm running my work laptop that was installed with Windows Vista Enterprise x64 RTM and went through SP1, upgrade to Windows 7 RTM and SP1.

At home, my desktop has Ultimate but went the same path and will be upgraded to Windows 8. Playing with a new UPS corrupted my system drive or it would be from XP to 8.

I don't fell my machines have more problems than people I know that are always installing and resinstalling machines.

[08:13] - Is there a way to make title bars smaller on Windows 8.

the option is now under screen resolution->"make text or items larger or smaller"

This is only 1 example of the horrible UX with Windows 8. For example Win8 also misses the most important setting for non English users ever: Icon spacing

MS removed it because of the ignorance that other languages have different length in their names. becasue of this the texts are truncated on the desktop. But this is the plan of MSFT, damage the desktop to move the user to their fullscreen "the thing which should be no longer called Metro" hell

[09:33] - Aero transparency stopped working.

@Gov, only because you don't understand Aero Glass it should not be disabled. Aero Glass is perfect, because it FOCUSES you on the text, now with the ugly opaque I always look at the title bars instead of the content which is terrible. Again your User Unexperience Team has no idea of good UX

Erm... what's the link to the Win-X Shortcut article?

Altering the Win+X shortcut has been THE most helpful tip for Win8 I've come accross yet..

"%windir%\System32\shutdown.exe /s /t 0" AND 
"%windir%\System32\shutdown.exe /r /t 0" = Beautiful In this menu

It's completely terrible that Microsoft doesn't supply these two options as "Group3" and have the tools as "Group4" As such:

Microsoft please release a windows update to enable/allow that right-click menu to have the small .lnk icons used for shortcuts.

Thanks again for the tip Larry.

That Windows + X trick is neat.

@magicandre I'm afraid I agree with you about the new Windows 8 Aero theme. I really don't care about Aero Glass, in fact, I have it disabled on my Windows 7 install, but the new layout seems like a regression to the XP days.
I don't know if there is a technical reason why Microsoft didn't take the chance to get rid of superflual elements of the UI, like the window border, but using WPF Metro-like apps like MetroTwit, you start to appreciate how simple and unobtrusive the layout can be.

I would like to know if we can upgrade from windows 7 OEM to windows 8 or not? I bought the laptop with windows 7 OEM in Feb 2012. I have already got the Windows 8 iso with me through MSDN premium subscription.