I told MS to upgrade my Win 7 machine yesterday. Went to watch a couple of GoT episodes and everything was done when I came back.
I then got to select the privacy options and everything is running great with all my data in place.
Win 10 seems snappy, even compared to Win 7. But it will take more time to truly assess that.
My wife’s Win 8 laptop was exactly the same.
Win 10 upgrades are pretty mature by now. As long as you have your documents and pictures backed up somewhere (always a good idea in case of your HD doing anyway), I don’t think there is much to worry about.
Wendelius
If you download the entire Win10 update from the MS site, can you apply it after the deadline to any licensed PC running Win7 or 8?
I am guessing it does a key check at time of deployment, so I would not think so.
[quote=“arrendek, post:2739, topic:75647, full:true”]
The nice thing about going to a new drive is your old drive is still ready and functions as a backup. In fact, on one of my machines, it asks when I boot if I want to go back and use the Windows 7 drive to boot into Windows 7 instead of Windows 10.[/quote]
Is your copy of Windows 7 de-activated then? I read that’s what happens when you upgrade to a fresh copy of Windows 10 on a new SSD. Just wanted to make sure.
Yes by using the Windows 7 key for Windows 10 I’m pretty sure it won’t work in the future for Windows 7. Although I think I read there is a grace period where they both work for a time.
stusser
2747
From what I’ve read, there’s a legal answer and a technical answer to this question.
Legally, your Win7 license is subsumed by the Win10 upgrade and can no longer be used.
Technically, it will still work fine and nobody will ever know. I won’t judge you, I promise.
Sweet. Sometimes France isn’t all crazy when it comes to internet (and things).
sevagon
2749
System update in a few days ,but new fresh install will be available much later.
Last day for the free update. No bitching about it Tomorrow! August 2nd will be a huge update, so be prepared.
JeffL
2751
I fear I will regret this, but plan to do the update on my Alienware M17x laptop (my only home pc) today. Currently using Acronis to do a full backup to an external USB HDD, about an hour and a half left on that.
They’ll wait a couple weeks then bring back free upgrades “for a limited time”, just like dropping the Xbox price. That’s my prediction.
Not sure why you would regret it. I’ve updated 5 machines, aged 7 to 3 years old and running a variety of versions of Windows between 7 and 8.1.
All upgrades were seamless and really easy. The most I had to do was reinstall the Radeon drivers on one of the machines as it had lost track of the video card.
Windows 10 runs well on all machines and is an improvement functionally on Windows 8 (and even 7), IMO.
It’s all a piece of cake.
Wendelius
Remember to unplug all your external devices before upgrading, that USB drive in particular. Better safe than sorry.
JeffL
2755
OK, finally updated (7 to 10.) Told MS “No” to all the stuff on startup (“Do you want to send all your emails to Microsoft so we can analyze them and give you a wonderful advertising experience?” etc.)
So far, not seeing any real improvements or negatives other than my nice list of pinned programs on the startup is gone. Lots of stuff there in boxes in the Start or Windows or whatever you call the windows icon where the start button used to be that I don’t care about but it isn’t hurting anything. It kindly asked me if I wanted Edge as my default browser and let me choose Chrome. So now to test some of my frequently used programs.
Updated my 8.1 laptop and my main win7 desktop on the last day, of course. Still fiddling around, but everything seems to have worked out ok (Cortana not working on my laptop, but not sure I care).
One genuine surprise - it seems to be much more of a move back to Windows7 than I expected, at least from a UI perspective. I thought it would be much more like Win8/8.1 in general except with a better start menu – this is much, much better than I anticipated. I wouldn’t have waited so long if I realized that the adjustment from Windows7 would be so painless, although waiting for microsoft isn’t a bad thing usually.
Now I’m debating updating a 2006 system I have that currently has Windows XP (I’ll lose all the files and have to do a clean install of Windows 7 first, but I think I might do it, just to hook up as a media server on one of the TVs so I don’t have to use wifi. Good/bad idea?
JeffL
2757
And first issue:
I currently use Zoom Player as my default program for playing back media files (mp3s, video files.) Now. when I double click an MP3 I get a message asking if I want to let this program make changes to my PC? Every time. So I can’t just double click a music or video file to play it without going through that message.
How do I turn this off for a given program???
JeffL
2758
Well, I didn’t figure it out but I worked around it by using VLC as my default media player for now. For some odd reason, though, setting it as the default audio and video player doesn’t set it to default for flv files, and when I use “open with” and choose VLC it still doesn’t change the default for flv files. Suggestions?
Ran a few of my keys (I have quite a few Win7 keys from I don’t remember what promotion back in the day) through Win10’s “change product key” UI.
Dunno if that works for enabling their use in the future - this was in a VM if that matters. Any experience from others on this front?
LMN8R
2760
Just FYI on the options you disabled during the first-run experience. One of the things that’s been true about Cortana since it launched back on Windows Phone is that it does not send any of your emails to Microsoft, and none of your emails or other personal data is used for advertising purposes.
What Cortana does is specifically process emails and other similar information locally on your PC for purposes of doing things similar to Google Now - it’ll show you package tracking automatically if it sees an email from UPS, it’ll show you flight information and automatically add flights to your calendar when it detects flight emails from airlines, and so forth.
Unlike Google Now, it doesn’t require any of those emails to be on Microsoft servers to do this. It’ll locally process the emails in the Mail app to do all of it.
Furthermore, Cortana has a “Notebook” in the menu that neatly and comprehensively organizes everything it “knows” about you from looking at that locally-stored data. From the notebook, you can easily ask it to “forget” anything you don’t want it to know one-by-one if you don’t want to disable the feature entirely.
All of this nuance is been lost in the hysteria and fear mongering from mostly uninformed tech bloggers. And maybe the nuance still doesn’t matter to you and you still want nothing to do with the features, that’s great. But in case you did want to know, there it is.
JeffL
2761
OK - for some reason my laptop seems a lot slower now. In particular accessing files, getting the “Properties” up when I right click on a file in Opus or File Explorer, etc. It just feels like everything is dragging.
Is it possible that somehow the upgrade messed up my C:\ SSD? The driver or something like that?
