| | | Windows 10 Upgrade.
I thought I'd post my experience and opinion about it in case you're debating to do it or not and / or wait. I have 4 machines. They were running W7 or W8.1. I didn't wait for the MS download schedule, I went to MS site here and downloaded the version I needed. In my case I needed Home 32 bit, Home 64 bit and Pro 64 bit and put them on different flash drives.
I went to the appropriate places and downloaded all the drivers I'd need for my different ASUS and ASRock motherboards and also to Samsung for my netbook N10 and put them on a separate flash drive. Then I backed up all my personal files and FF / Chrome bookmarks I wanted to keep.
I built my desktop systems, they are 3-6 years old and all have SSD's, even the netbook ( I did that upgrade about 3 years ago ). I build systems to be quiet, fast, and as secure as possible. I don't do cloud computing, overclock or game and keep only the required programs I use on them.
My experience was similar on each and every machine. I booted normally, inserted the flash drive, executed the setup file and selected the upgrade option. The upgrades proceeded without problems. When asked I entered the original Windows key. When asked I turned off all the options offered. When asked I created a local account. After the last reboot it opened W10 and I was surprised to find it had identified and auto installed all the drivers for everything, even an old Radeon HD4650 and the Audioengine D1 dac, not to mention the ones for the 6 yr old netbook. I was impressed.
I checked settings - update and security - activation and all were activated.
I wanted a clean install so I changed the boot order in the BIOS and booted from the flash drive and installed again from scratch, deleting all the partitions, this time when it asked for the Windows key I clicked - skip this step - since MS now holds my keys on their servers. At the first reboot I removed the flash drive to avoid a boot loop - you get a warning that it will reboot in 9 seconds - and everything proceeded as normal.
When finished I changed the BIOS back to boot from the SSD, checked the drivers again and they were there, went to settings verified they were activated and updated a few times until it was finished, then started making things as secure as possible. In setting I clicked on each one and pretty much turned off everything possible, there are pages and pages of things I don't use or want.
This has been the easiest Windows upgrade I've ever done and I like 10 so far. Everything is fast and no problems at all. I intend to do my last machine soon. Time invested was about 2 hours per machine.
I looked at Edge a bit and it looks good, but I use FF and Chrome so I installed those. I don't use a lot of different software and in 10 they have a pdf reader and so far I'm using Defender. I haven't installed or needed Silverlight, Java, Foxit Reader, FlashPlayer or Avast. Both YouTube and Netflix work fine.
fwiw this is what I installed and use.
Libre Office
Malwarebytes
Revo Uninstaller
VLC Player
HW Monitor
Firefox
Chrome
Below are a few links in case you're interested.
cnet.com
lifehacker.com
yahoo.com
thenextweb.com |
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