1941

Can I do a fresh install of Windows 10 without installing Windows 7 upgrade first? Can I do full Windows 10 with upgrade version of win 7 vs. full version?

1942

As of the 1511 update, you can do a fresh install and use your Win7/8 key.

1943

Even an upgrade disk? I know in the past I had to do ridiculous work around to get a fresh copy of Windows 7 installed with my upgrade disk. So this is super fantastic if true!

1944

Yep, you just need a key. Don’t even have to input it at the time of install.

1945

YES! I am so happy, just made my day!

1946

Nice to see you JP.

1947

Awww nice to see you too Rich! :)

1948

Finally took the plunge. No horror stories, although it seemed at times as if the upgrade decided to take naps. Total time was about two hours.

1949

Was running an 8.1 laptop and finally jumped to 10 this morning. I’d downloaded the update earlier this week, but held off on installing until today just to go thru and make sure I’d saved any wayward files.

Did the update itself this morning. It took about an hour, maybe less, and seems to be running fine now. No files missing and even the few logins I keep saved in my browser are working fine. I haven’t tried all my games and whatnot, but so far so good with no problems at all.

1950

I may have figured out why my Surface Pro 3 freezes at the startup screen after an update. When windows 10 shuts down it creates a file containing the current state of your computer. When you turn your computer back on win10 grabs this file and uses it to startup instead of going through the normal boot process. Evidently this file can become corrupt fairly easily. To prevent win10 from using this file at startup go into the setting “Choose what the power button does”. In that window scroll down until you see shutdown settings. Uncheck ‘Turn on fast startup’ and now your computer will load all drivers, etc. every time you boot up. You may need to be an administrator in order to turn this setting off.

1951

I had a lot of problems getting Win 10 to install on my son’s PC (running Win 7). We kept getting the error 80070005. I tried everything I could think of but nothing helped. I then ran a free utility from tweaking.com (the repair tool; I used the default settings). After rebooting we were finally able to get Win 10 to install.

1952

Weird. Any idea what might have been the cause?

1953

Thanks to you all I have a clean install of Windows 10. Wow have I missed sitting at my PC over the past year!

So that aside I have some super dumb questions.

#1 - I have a good Asus Maximus motherboard. I used to always do a clean Windows 7 install, then install Asus’s drivers, then finish all the service packs and other updates. With Windows 10 do I still need to install all of the drivers off Asus’s website (they have Windows 10 versions)?

#2 - NVidia and Creative Labs Drivers. Same question I think. Should I still install NVidia/CL drivers separately?

#3 - Should I force myself to get used to the new layouts (does it pay off?), or try and get back to my comfortable Windows 7 style of everything? Right now I can’t find anything unless I type it into the search bar.

#4 - I have Office 2007. I have no money for Office products but still need them. Will installing such an old version of Office mess system files or anything else on Windows 10? I always do full install of like “everything” so I know there’s possibly old junk that might slow my system or do something it doesn’t like.

#5 - Looks like a lot of stuff is being downloaded automatically. I allowed Cortana to accumulate all information for the time being to help Microsoft out and maybe subsidize the cost of upgrading my Windows 10 for free. What settings do you all use for the data collection etc? Just how much data is being downloaded that I don’t need? I nearly hit my data cap everything month as it is.

1954

I can only answer #4. Office 2007 works great on Windows 10. I did that for a friend last week. Incidentally, if you can’t find you disc, I found a link to download from Microsoft (you put in your key and download the installer)

1955

For drivers, after I reinstalled Win10 clean, I just let Win10 decide what drivers to grab - and oddly enough I’ve encountered no issues having done so. This probably isn’t optimal but I haven’t had a reason to scour the internet for all the various slight updates. The nVidia driver is a bit outdated, so would probably be the first to update outside of Win10 (assuming you have a card or specific games new enough to need a newer driver!)

1956

For shits and giggles, I’m trying to update to Windows 10 on an ancient Dell Inspiron 1300. This thing has a 1.6GHz “Dothan” Celeron processor from 2004/2005, 2GB of 533MHz RAM, and a really, really, really slow hard drive. It was running Windows 7, albeit very slowly. I thought about maybe tossing in a really cheap SSD to see if it would speed it up any, but it’s so old it doesn’t have SATA, it’s still running IDE.

I suspect the upgrade process will take all night.

1957

I’ve updated one last thing to windows 10. I have a tiny win 7 pro 32bit virtualbox VM with 1 core and 1GB of ram allocated to it running basically my web server (iis) with some custom web apps I wrote and forums. It took me about 10 tries to upgrade it.

  • The built in update didn’t like my virtualbox video driver. Running the media creation tool and saying upgrade my pc now lets you get around that check.
  • had some boot safe_os issue. I bumped up the ram to 4GB, changed it to 2 cores, and moved the drive from SATA to IDE (I think this was the key change).
  • I had to reactivate win 7 after the hard drive interface change.
  • Hung on checking for updates. Start a command line as admin and run: net stop wuauserv
  • After the upgrade I was able to move the hard drive VDI back to SATA and win 10 still remained activated.

Finally, the upgrade took and everything seems to be running ok. I’m leaving it with the higher allocated hw resources for now since my website seems to be more responsive and the host pc doesn’t seem to be taxed that much.

1958

Super help thanks! So I think I’ll just update Nvidia drivers and maybe the Creative Labs driver for my Soundblaster Zx.

Woolen - hehe that sounds like a fascinating challenge. Let us know how you come out.

1959

Well, it took all night, but it installed and is working, sorta.

This was a no-budget Dell laptop from 10 years ago that my ex-brother-in-law bought for my sister for Xmas. It was built for XP, and it ran that slowly. But it seems to run Windows 10 a bit faster than it ran Windows 7, though I wonder how much it has to do with having a fairly clean install. Windows 7 had built up a lot of cruft over the years.

This thing has a single core, single-threaded 1.6Ghz Celeron processor, pre-DDR RAM, and an EIDE hard drive. It’s incredibly obsolete in pretty much every regard, but Windows 10 is running. The big problem is that Intel did not make any Windows 10 drivers for whatever rudimentary graphics chipset they put in this thing (I believe it’s an early version of the Graphics Media Accelerator), but there appear to be workarounds to get the Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 driver to work. I’ll have to look into it.

1960

Crap a bunch of my hard drives are not showing up… Not sure if it’s partially BIOS related Windows 10 or both. I have 7 hard drives and one optical drive. Can only see 4. I had disconnected everything but my boot drive to do the install from a USB stick.