BigLar

Correction: I tried it with a Win 7 64-bit machine. Tried to run setup but it said I should use the 64-bit version. So, apparently, it duplicates the version (Home, Pro, etc.) and bit level (32, 64) on the machine it's downloaded to. Not necessarily a show-stopper; next test is to see if the DVD I already have (Win 7 Pro, 32-bit) will install itself on another machine running that.

The next test is, if it installs OK, will it activate OK? If not, then I'll try the "long form" version - get the Media Tool, download the upgrade, have at it.

<sigh>

Not that I'm really excited about using Windows 10, but progress marches on and ya gotta keep up with the Jones'es. Or something like that.

More later.

DYKWIA

Why are to trying to do it this way?

As has been said, just run the Win10 upgrade and it will upgrade Win7 and leave it activated. All your programs and data will remain. You can also "roll back" to Win7 if necessary.

YVR Cockroach

There used to be a 30 day window rollback in the past but IIRC rollback is no longer an option?

BigLar

I don't know about the "rollback". I have enough machines running Win 7 - I'm just looking at the procedure for getting to Win 10 if necessary., So ...

Progress Report

I used the older machine I mentioned above because it was running Win 7 64 bit. Went through the on line procedure to get the Media Tool and selected the option to make a DVD. The options presented include the language, version, and bit level, but they were greyed out. There was also a check box (already selected), I un-checked it and the options became changeable. The only one that had an option I was interested in was the bit selection. 64-bit was alreeady selected, but the options were 32, 64, and both. I selected both and away we went.

By the way - downloading the 32 bit only option resulted in a file approaching 3 Gb. The "both" option gave me a file over 7 GB. Gonna need a dual-level DVD/burner. The on-board DVD burner was acting up, so I wound up transferring the file to a network drive and from there to another machine I had that had a known good burner. Trust me, horsing 7 Gb files around (even though they were running at 10-12 Mbytes/sec) still takes a while.

Anyhow, I finally got it burned and attempted to load it into the machine. It went on and on, downloaded many megabytes of updates and drivers, asked me for a lot of personal information, and finally came up.

A quick check of the status showed --Hooray!-- it was activated with the digital thingy!

Conclusions

Yes, the activation process still works.

The DVD you want to use will only upgrade like-to-like (Pro -> Pro, Home -> Home, etc.), but you can have both 32-bit and 64-bit versions on one DVD.

There's a lot of hassle involved. If you're only going to upgrade one machine, I'd recommend the "Upgrade this PC" option and be done with it. Because I have a number of machines, I'll use the DVD - it's already downloaded and burned, so it'll just be a matter of loading the DVD and executing "Setup" from the DVD. All my Win 7 machines are the Pro version.

DYKWIA

OK, you're probably correct. Thanks.

DenverBrian

Which would be the process for the 99.9% of users who would still need to upgrade to Win10 at this stage, yes? I'm thinking your unique situation is not particularly common.

BigLar

Oh sure! I'm not saying it's common, but since I am in that situation, no harm in trying it out.

BTW, I do believe there are more than a handful of folks out there who have more than one computer (work, home, kids, etc.), so now they have confirmation about alternative procedures. If no one else goes this route, at least I amused myself.

Loren Pechtel

I have just upgraded two machines. I've lost the URL with the directions but here's a Powershell script that does it:

$dir = "c:\temp"
mkdir $dir
$webClient = New-Object System.Net.WebClient
$url = "https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=799445"
$file = "$($dir)\Win10Upgrade.exe"
$webClient.DownloadFile($url,$file)
Start-Process -FilePath $file -ArgumentList "/quietinstall /skipeula /auto upgrade /copylogs $dir"

By default Powershell won't run a script, you have to set it to do so, I've lost the URL that said how but I'm sure Google will turn up something. (Caution--this got word-wrapped, the last line starts with Start-Process.)

This script worked perfectly on my laptop, but my desktop wasn't anything like hassle free.

First, I forgot to disable my AV, this of course tripped multiple warnings (after all, it's messing with stuff that's usually only messed with by evil programs) and it appeared to die from this. On my second try I turned off the AV and simply ran the last line of the script manually. It chewed for quite a while and then sat there doing nothing. Reboot, the third try without all the parameters found everything already downloaded and found a program it didn't like and demanded it be uninstalled. (I presume this is what happened to the second try, but it couldn't come up and ask.) Ditch that, it installed. No audio devices, the solution that everybody lists isn't relevant to my system. After cursing it for a while I uninstalled every audio driver and rebooted--Windows reinstalled all but one legacy item that an uninstaller failed to get rid of long ago. At that point the audio troubleshooter was able to fix them. (And I find the program I had to uninstall is now moot anyway.)

radonc1

While I have some working knowledge of computers, I am at the level of not knowing enough to avoid getting into hot water

I have copied my internal HDD to my external backup drive. Can I run an upgrade test using the external drive as the test platform?
Or, should I just get another external HDD and clone my existing drive to it (meaning that there is something different about cloning vs copying a drive)

Will I be able to do an upgrade on an external HDD using the MS program?

Will MS allow me to, if the above is successful, reuse the "one machine " upgrade on my internal HD if I ran it for the external HDD?

TIA for the advice

YVR Cockroach

Once you get the OS upgraded and activated, it is activated for the life of the computer, unless you do a very major change (e.g., change motherboards. CPU, RAM, drive and CPU changes, at least one at a time, doesn't disrupt it) so you can "reuse" it such as by getting a brand new boot drive and doing a clean install (i.e., install the OS on a blank drive).and it will activate with the OS version as previously activated.

What I would recommend you do is buy an internal SSD (faster, worth it, and very cheap these days - $100 for 1TB, a little bit more for a Samsung Evo?). Purge your current drive of junk - namely, unused apps and clean the registry (crap cleaner works, maybe regclean (MS product) too), and then clone your existing HDD to the clone drive. Replace the HDD with the SSD (some changes to the BIOS may be necessary to select boot drive) and use the HDD as your data drive. Depending on what you have in your computer and what it is, no extra equipment may be needed other than to open it up.

I am not sure you can use a USB-connected external drive to boot (never tried that, and I know some of my old computers will not boot from a USB key drive, or from a USB port).

Adding: If you are going to use an USB drive, and your computer has USB 3 ports (blue tab instead of a black tab), use those ports as it should be faster.

Only caution about SSDs is that they can fail, and very suddenly at that. My first (OCZ) worked fine for 2-3 weeks then it suddenly failed, at the beginning of a trip through Europe (I had the OEM drive with me so used that). RMA was DOA. 3rd drive lasted 3-4 years before suddenly failing too. Have had 2 Samsungs for over 3-4 years now which are fine, and have AData on 3 machines and a cheap Lexar on another. If nothing else, backup data.

DYKWIA

What I would do in your situation (I did this last week for my Sister) :-

1. Buy a new hard drive (preferably a nice fast SSD). I bought a Crucial BX5000 240GB drive for £27 from Amazon. My sister doesn't have much stored locally, so her existing drive was only around 50GB full.

2. Clone the existing drive to the new drive using Macrium Reflect 7 - there is a free version of this. This clones the whole drive, including the boot and hidden partitions.

https://blog.macrium.com/techie-tues...k-764bed0ad6e1

3. If you are comfortable swapping hard drives, replace the existing drive with the new drive. Switch on the computer, and all should be well. Alternatively, just keep the new drive as the backup for now.

4. Go to the Windows 10 Upgrade page on the Microsoft Website (I can't get the link as I'm on a Mac, and it re-directs me).

5. Do the in-place upgrade. This should upgrade Win7 to Win10, and leave everything in place. Win10 will be activated.

6. Assuming everything is OK, run Disk Cleanup to remove all old Windows versions.

If anything went wrong, or you want to go back to Win7, use the restore functionality from Macrium as per :-

Rescue a system with the Windows PE environment

nkedel

$99.99 for a number of decent ones and a couple of non-brand ones a few dollars under... although the one I'd recommend there as an HDD upgrade is single digits dollars over (Crucial MX500.)

Not sure if most people actually need 1TB. If you have a 1TB HDD, but only 200-300GB (or even less) are occupied, a 500GB SSD will do fine. The $30-40 difference (480/500/512GB SSDs typically run $60-70) isn't much in some sense but for some folks "around $100" is stating to be a major purchase.

YVR Cockroach

True enough. I go for the larger drive to store media (primary storage for photo files taken off memory cards, and of course have a portable HDD as a secondary storage).

I really see a SSD as a major performance boost that will be effective and last for the remaining lifetime of an old computer. For most non-computational intensive usage, an older computer with enough RAM and an SSD is more than fast enough for most people's needs.

nkedel

SSDs fail at a much lower rate than HDDs; it's always worth backing things up, but compared to the risk of losting an HDD to drop/shock/vibration (even with freefall sensors in some systems) the risk of random electronic failure or thermal damage is quite low on either. The oldest SSD I own is ~11 years old and still works fine in a case (even if it's at this point about as fast as a good microSDXC card, and smaller.)

Not sure how long ago the OCZ was, but OCZ had some really, really terrible drives about a decade ago. Sandforce controllers were really fast for their time, but the early firmware for them was terrible, and poor quality control at OCZ + Sandforce controllers + slow release of firmware was a toxic combination in the Vertex 2 generation.

nkedel

Sure, makes sense, and for those of us where $30 isn't much money (or even if it is, for folks who don't do their own upgrades, where the cost of paying someone else to upgrade it is significant), nobody's ever said "I've got too much disk space."

SSDs will likely outlast the computer you put them in; I've only ever had one fail outside of data center use. They're still much faster than any rotational disks.

High end older PCs are often faster than low end new ones back past the 10 year mark. The biggest limitations will be RAM capacity -- anything too old to put 8GB into is probably no longer worth upgrading unless you are really, really careful what software you use and to keep RAM usage down. I just got a cheapie Dell Outlet machine (3190 2-in-1, sub-$200 refurb "education" machine) specifically to have something I could take places I'd otherwise be worried about losing or damaging it and the processor (Pentium N5000) and disk (128GB OEM SSD) are fine and it feels pretty snappy if I have only Chrome open and not too many other tabs, but with 4GB running out of RAM happens really fast.

For laptops (or desktops), basically anything i5 or i7 ever made is still pretty decent except for a very few of the early ultra-low-voltage ones (then again, those tended to be too slow even when new.) The best deals in laptops out there right now, by a very large margin, are used business machines from 2012. Refurb with warranty from Newegg and other sellers, around $200.

For desktops, higher-clocked Core 2 Duos and any Core 2 Quad (or comparable AMDs) are still pretty decentu. Core 2 Duo laptops are sort of on the margin -- I'm not sure how the availability of 4GB DDR2 SO-DIMMs is for bringing them up to 8GB (and 1st generation ones from 2006 usually could only go to 3.5GB because of a chipset limit) and the lower clocks make them often too slow to be worth bothering with (and the few ULV Core 2s were universally too slow even when new.)