UA Fan

Sorry if covered before. If one has upgrades and then needs to format the laptop, does the old version come back or W10?

nkedel

How do you mean "format" -- if you reformat it, in the literal sense, there will be no OS on there and you'll need installation media (DVD or USB key) to reinstall one or the other.

Windows 10 upgrade generally breaks the older version "restore partition" feature.

UA Fan

The kind of formatting when you have viruses that anti-virus software can't seem to get rid off.

nkedel

Ideally, that's from the ground up. So you want to have a copy of your reinstall media made in advance. Windows 10, you can get via the media creation tool; Windows 7 may be downloadable given a valid product key.

Although, that said, I am really curious whether the "reset" functionality is adequate to get rid of viruses. I'm inclined to doubt it, but you never know for sure until it's been out there in the wild for longer.

UA Fan

Can explain that is simpler words for this non-tech savvy person?

nkedel

There is a feature called "reset" in Windows 10 (and 8/8.1) which basically does a reinstall of the system in place. It's not clear to me whether this does a thorough enough wipe to get rid of serious malware infections.

Reinstalling and reformatting is a much simpler matter and hasn't really changed since Vista came out.

Tiki

I finally got the invitation to download. It took about half an hour just to download and another 40 min to set it up. So far I like it! My Surface Pro is working fine and my Office 2013 is intact. I'm not going to upgrade the Win 7 on my 2012 model HP laptop. It ain't broke so I don't need to fix it! But I really hated that Win 8.1 on the Surface!

Anyway now I have plenty of time to get used to the Win 10 so when I get a new laptop which will be at least a couple years into the future, it will have been designed to work with Win 10.

piper28

The black screen with cursor is still winning on my work pc. Definitely think it's a driver issue. Interestingly, it doesn't look like the reset windows 10 procedure will take it back to a point before this problem happened. I've seen some people indicate that win 10 gets confused when you're using the onboard and an add-on card simultaneously and ends up thinking you actually have 1 more monitor than you do, and that it's really working ok, just the login display is on the non-existent monitor. I need to try a couple of things to confirm that.

piper28

Hmm, my black screen issue is definitely related to the video stuff. If I pull the plug to the monitor connected to the onboard card, the two connected to the nvidia card start working properly. I can also force them on using the windows-p stuff, but still can't manage to get all three working at once. Might end up having to go back to two monitors for a while.

PTravel

So far, I've upgraded 5 of my machines from Win7 to Win10. It went smoothly on 4 of the 5 and was a nightmare on one. A couple of things to watch out for:

1. Win10 does not play nicely with any high-end audio interfaces (I can't speak to the cheaper ones). In two instances, the only way I could get my interfaces working at all (one with a beta Win10 driver, the other with the Win7 driver) was to completely disable the built-in Realtek audio on the motherboards. This involved disabling the Realtek audio in Device Manager and then removing the audio drivers, and then disabling the Realtek audio in the BIOS. Microsoft has, apparently, attempted to lower the latency of Windows audio but, in doing so, interfered severely with any ASIO-based audio driver. If you don't know what all of this means, then it won't be a problem for you.

2. It is essential to update screen management tools like Display Fusion, Display Link and similar tools. The best way to do it is to uninstall the software completely, reboot, then re-install.

3. After the upgrade, go through all of the Settings, clicked on Advanced, and disable all of Microsoft's spyware. It's really intrusive stuff, and it's buried.

4. Upgrade your computer's BIOS before doing the upgrade. That was the cause of the problem on one of my machines -- according to Windows support, the installation wouldn't finish because the BIOS needed an upgrade. That's where the nightmare began. Rather than upgrade the BIOS, I decided to just replace the motherboard (I got a nice new 4 GHz quadcore i7 with 32 GB of RAM). Of course, once I did this, Win7 decided it was unauthorized. I just decided to do a clean install of Win10 -- at the time, the documentation didn't indicate that a clean install required a Win10 serial. I did that and it failed. I decided to just do a clean install of Win7 which, because it was an upgrade, required a clean install of XP (which, of course was an upgrade and required that I feed it an earlier version of Windows -- I keep an old Win95 disk around for this). Once Win7 was installed, I ran the upgrade for Win10. Everything was fine, except that it wouldn't authenticate. I called Microsoft and told them what happened. They asked me for SN of Win7. I told them I had no idea, as I have several licensed copies of Windows 7 and didn't know which one I had used. 3 hours, 4 phone calls and 2 hangups from reps in India later, I got a real supervisor at Level 2 support who got my system validated. As a punchline, rather than trash the old MB, I threw it in a case with an old power supply and a hard drive, updated the BIOS, installed Win7 (and this time made a point of keeping track of which installation disk I used) and upgraded to Win10 with no difficulty.

5. Win10 does boot faster and occupies a smaller footprint. That's why I've installed it on my machines. In terms of software compatibility, I haven't hit any issues. However, as noted, hardware and, particularly, relatively specialized hardware is an issue.

nkedel

Wow, there's a poster I haven't seen in a while -- welcome back!

superangrypenguin

Le Sigh.

When you do things like this, Cortana cannot help you out. While I get your viewpoint on this, all I can do is shake my head. You seem like a technical person, I hope you don't use Google or visit the internet. Every vendor tracks as much as they can about you. At least Microsoft is using the information to improve your day to day life (such as Cortana integration), as opposed to selling the data to an advertiser.

pseudoswede

No doubt! I miss your musings here in this forum, PTravel.

nkedel

Neither Google (nor my employer, who also makes their money on advertising) is selling your data to advertisers -- if they did, they'd make a lot less money on it then the advertisers wouldn't need them to reach you. Instead, sell access to your eyeballs, and it's pretty easy to block the ads.

Microsoft does the exact same thing, with Bing and Hotmail/MSN/Live.com/Outlook.com and through their own third party ad network (which isn't nearly as successful as Google's). Equally easy to block the ads, when accessing via the web.

So far, MS has taken a very low-key approach to in-OS advertising on Windows 10. That could change. OTOH, the system is not especially locked down (compared to the iOS or Android, or Windows Phone ... or how Windows RT was) and I'm sure there will be system-level ad blockers if they change that.

Dodge DeBoulet

Damn, dude, good to have you back. Please stick around