I had to replace my primary laptop this summer and decided to try a Windows 7 machine with a 64-bit processor.  I had some concerns because I use lots of old software, including several old versions of Crystal Reports and I wondered how well everything would run in the new environment.  I upgraded to Vista a few years back and it took lots of work to get all the pieces of my operation going again.

But this time I am happy to report that things went pretty smoothly.   I run three different versions of CR (v8.5, v10 and v12) which I find covers all the bases.  All three run fine on this machine.  And in general the transition from Vista to Windows 7 was much smoother than my last upgrade which was to Vista.

The one thing that confused me was the fact that 64 bit machines use 64-bit ODBC, while all of my programs use 32-bit ODBC.  The 32 ODBC connections are kept completely separate, and the 32-bit ODBC administrator is not listed at all in the control panel.   So it took a bit of research to learn that my laptop had two different ODBC administrators, one for 64-bit ODBC and one for 32-bit ODBC.   To load the 32-bit ODBC administrator you have to find and run this program, usually in this folder:

C:\Windows\SysWOW64\odbcad32.exe

But other than that issue I have had no trouble installing the versions mentioned above, running them, and doing customer projects in them.