Letitride3c

Upgrade successfully 4 machines thus far, 3 on W10Pro (from W7's) and 1 W10 (from 8.1) - not surprised that easiest & smooth upgrade were the Dell's (2 Intel chipsets and 1 AMD's) but the Sony Viao, my small travel netbook (with AMD's) is the PITA with the Catalyst 15.2 driver released for W10 is not playing nice (others are complaining BSOD) Mine just saying missing/unable to find drivers signature at boot-up , press OK and continue - seemed fine so far.

Select HP, Toshiba and Panasonic systems were said to be running into issues as well. There's a workaround (of course, usually) so I'm going to play tonight when I'm settled into the hotel for the weekend. Extra goodies on USB drives, just in case to fix the Radeon drivers. OEM not expecting to release any patches or drivers until Sept/Oct & continued with its PSA warning users not to do the upgrade.

Did a clean upgrade on the laptop & went smoothly - the "Reset" function might be okay for some, without going thru the whole full install routines - and faster ... might do that on the next PC. Got 1 more desktop to upgrade and that's it for our personal ones - 3 other PC's (one triple booting now) not taking the upgrade path, but might do one more on a spare HDD & set it aside, grab the "free" license.

Those in the workplace is another story for the IT to do, but PC's doing patient data under HIPAA (medical info) got the upgrade disabled/rolled back - can't see transitioning anytime soon, not until compliance & everyone else get a good workup on privacy concerns.

BigLar

Reading the posts here (and other places), I think it might be best for me to wait a while before upgrading.

I have 10 laptops and a couple of desktops that have been registered for the upgrades. Nothing has been downloaded yet. I'm still a little unclear as to how the process will work.

As I understand it, they will download the whole thing to you (over time, I suppose) and then you can give them the go-ahead and they will start an in-place upgrade.

How do they activate it? Do they use your existing Win7/8 key or what?

Since most of my machines are laptops, it's a simple matter to slip out the Win7 hd and put in another one for Win10. How would they do that if all the data is on your other drive? Is that even possible?

I registered each of the computers with my email address. Suppose I give away/sell a laptop. Does the upgrade follow the laptop or is it somehow associated with my email address?

Clearly, I'm nervous about just taking Microsoft's word for it that everything will be wonderful and I'll quickly forget about everything that's gone before. I want the option of using whatever OS I want, especially since there will probably be driver issues to be straightened out over time.

WillCAD

I don't know all of the answers, but I know a little.

When you get the W10 logo in your system tray and register for the upgrade, it will automatically download the W10 installation files in the background over time. Eventually, you'll get the notice to upgrade.

If you don't want to wait, you can manually trip the upgrade here:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/soft...load/windows10

I did that on one of my PCs and it worked perfectly. I used the Windows icon in my system tray for another upgrade and it also worked perfectly.

When you do the in-place upgrade over W7, it automatically activates.

When I had so much trouble with my test machine, I called tech support and they had me read the product key from the W7 that was on it, so I'm guessing that the in-place upgrade normally reads the product key automatically to check your eligibility.

No matter what, though, your W10 product key is new, it's not the same as the key from your qualifying product.

As I understand it, the product keys are tied to the hardware, so your upgraded license will go with the PC.

If you want to have two drives and swap them, you can image the Win7 drive onto the blank, creating an exact copy, and only upgrade one of them.

superangrypenguin

If you're scared about upgrading, then wait. This is precisely the reason why MSFT did not release Windows 10 to all at the same time. Last I checked, 14 million people have it. So if you're not adventurous, don't load it yourself. Problem solved

BigLar

I'm confused.

Those words are usually preceded here by the phrase, "Get a Mac".

Wilbur

As WillCad said, you really don't have to do much to complete the upgrade. SOURCE: Four successful boxes upgraded at the beginning of this month around the house.

- No need for any Win7/Win8 keys.

- All of my upgrades kicked off before I went to bed, and in the morning, all was finished.

- Since then, I have gotten two service packs that fixed the one issue that we noticed.

Internaut

I did/have get/got a Mac. However, when it comes to my tech (as in most other walks of life), I'm a passionate believer in diversity . Windows 10 shows a great deal of promise, when it comes to claims of it being the best Windows yet. Let's hope Microsoft don't screw it up.

BigLar

I wasn't questioning the ease of upgrade.

If I understand it, you had 4 boxes running Win7/8. Now you have 4 boxes running Win10. As other have reported (here and elsewhere), there might be some problems with drivers, activating Win10 (depending on what kind of license you had), or other issues. In any event, if you don't like something about Win10, like software that doesn't run right with it, or anything else, you have one shot at going back to the old OS (is that true?).

If you have one laptop, say, and it doesn't work out, what do you do about it? Can you at least load it into a second partition and multi-boot the system? What options does one have if things don't work out like you were promised?

Finally, I'm still not really clear about the advantages of Win10 over Win7 and why I absolutely must upgrade.

(No I don't believe that the world is going to change as the Microsoft ads say. I think they said the same thing about Windows 8, 7, XP, 2000,...)

superangrypenguin

I believe Macs are for....[insert offending comment here]

I also prefer to be productive. Windows fanboy here ^

superangrypenguin

You can roll back the upgrade. Also, why? A whole slew of reasons. Performance being a major factor for me. Windows 7 is like 5 years old already.

Plus, end of mainstream support has already passed for Windows 7. End of support altogether is in 5 years. But...Windows 10 is the last version of Windows there is. So my suggestion is to do the free upgrade (while it's still free which is about a year from now), and then you're golden [afaik, I'm not sure how Microsoft will make money from Windows 10 for people who upgrade]

nkedel

1) For years, they one real way they made money on Windows from consumers has been the OEM licenses that come with new machine sales, and they will still get plenty of money on preinstall OEM licenses with new machine sales. (As you almost certainly know, but other people probably don't, if you are a business and want the Enterprise release, you HAVE to have a Pro license, either an OEM one from the machine or an expensive retail one -- you can't buy Enterprise directly.)

2) Machines bought in the past 6 years with Window 7-8.1 won't last forever (and those upgraded to 7 from XP/Vista from a couple of years older... much older than 8-9 years won't really run 10 at all well.)

3) There was a lot of non-license monetaization (app store revenue, media, and ads) that went into 8 and 8.1... badly. Nobody much used those if they can avoid it, and those of us that did mostly didn't use the features that set MS up for the outside revenue. Two-in-ones are finally catching on, and between that, convergence for apps between phone/tablet/desktop, and the perception that 10 doesn't suck the way 8/8.1 did may finally bring app developers to Windows (of course, desktop ones never left.)

4) Onedrive is starting to not suck, and the family license for Office 365+Onedrive is really a pretty good deal. I'd probably still be running 2003 with the file format converter pack on all my machines if it weren't for the home use program upgrades, and yet I'm seriously considering the 365 subscription... it's a much better deal (effectively 5TB of cloud for $100/year) than anybody else's paid cloud deal and 5 office licenses are basically a free add-on.

5) They've been hinting at some kind of subscription service for ages, and I suspect you'll see some kind of subscription for features or upgrades or additional cloud/value added services sometime soon.

superangrypenguin

I don't disagree with any of this, and this is a very awesome post by the way. ^ I am surprised that MSFT announced in the investor meeting that there will be no material "damage" caused by the free upgrade for home users $ wise. (which is what I was getting at)

I thought there would at least be a "hit" to the bottom line. Mind you, I don't think Win 10 will be free forever for people who have upgraded. I think in a few years they will charge - I recall seeing this somewhere, but either way, when Win 7 goes EOL, consumers will have to pay to get to Win 10 anyways unless they want to remain in an unsupported configuration. Mind you even OEM's won't be charged for Windows licenses for screens under 9"

Yeah I know MSFT is still raking in money. Mind you, profit is starting to decrease though relative to the good old days (cloud and all).

wco81

Looks like they want to monetize by collecting data from you and then serving you targeted ads.

I heard there was a bug with Wifi connectivity so on the eve of a trip, I'm going to hold off on upgrading indefinitely.

I clicked on the icon and went through some windows, to defer it indefinitely. But it either requires instant install or delay by a day or two. And this window, I couldn't dismiss.

So I tried rolling back to a previous restore point. Then I downloaded the installation files to a USB key, to deal with later.

But now I see two $Windows directories in my C drive so I had to Google a bit and figured out how to delete them, because they don't allow access even to administrator users.

I still got the icon in my tray but will ignore for now.

Maybe once someone figures out how to turn off all the phone home settings, I will give it a try then.

superangrypenguin

What wifi bug? You can just disable the Windows Update service if you're worried about it kicking off.

There are apps that disable the phone home stuff although it puzzles me why people are so concerned. Anyone here use Google? Browse the net? Info is always being collected about us.

Like...send me an email and chances are I can figure out where you sent it from just by looking at x-originating-ip...

Plus with things like Cortana and others, it needs access to your info to serve you info. Like how it tells me my flight is late...it looked at my calendar...

Just my personal opinions, tis all

wco81

Well I get to opt in for Google for their services.

Windows 10, you have to opt out of all those things in the OS.

Or you stay on previous Windows or go Linux to avoid the data collection.

I read somewhere that people were having problems connecting to certain Wifi networks compared to Windows 8. Actually Windows 8 Wifi is sometimes problematic too but I rather deal with something I know for now, since I'm taking off in a couple of days.