I finally did it...Windows 10 free upgrade on the last day!

[Kaido]

Same situation, practically, that's I'm in with my friend's mom.

My "Deluxe Service", includes:

Assuming that the PC in question has OEM pre-install of Windows 7 64-bit, with or without product key sticker on side of PC.

Install Macrium Reflect Free on their PC (this is to keep it within the license agreement, if you don't care about that, and have a Macrium Rescue USB, then you could use that). If not, install it to their (current) Win7 PC, and make a "Rescue USB" (requires a fresh USB flash drive).

Reboot with that Macrium Rescue USB, and a portable external USB3.0 HDD (presumably, if it came with Win7, it likely has at least one USB3.0 port on it). Choose Image Disk, select all partitions on current internal HDD/SSD, create an image file on the portable external HDD, select 4.0GB file sizes (more on that in the future). It will auto-chunk them, suitable for burning to DVD-R, BD-R, or storing on a FAT32 or exFAT or NTFS-formatted external drive. (Maytbe you need to use 3.99GB, if storing on a FAT32 drive, haven't tested this extensively.)

Then, power-down PC, physically remove HDD, install SSD of sufficient size to contain original filesystem contents, and with enough room for reasonable expansion in the future.

Boot Macrium Restore USB, plug in portable external HDD with backup, RESTORE the backup TO THE SSD.

Then, boot system with SSD internally, make sure that it boots, MAKE SURE TO RE-ACTIVATE IF NECESSARY, IT SHOULD DO SO AUTOMATICALLY.

Then download MCT from Microsoft.com , make another USB stick with Win10 USB installer on it. Then plug in this USB stick, run SETUP.EXE (within Windows 7) to upgrade in-place. (This is safest for OEM systems, that may not have a key-code sticker on them to use with a fresh install of Win10. Also, just pulling the currently-active key from the Win7 OEM installation pre-installed on the factory HDD MAY NOT WORK, as the pre-install keys are "generic", and won't allow a Win10 fresh install w/activation. Most keys on the side of the case ARE unique, and DO allow for a fresh Win10 installation w/activation.)

So, by making sure that the Win7 OS is ACTIVATED again after swapping the SSD in and restoring the backup to that SSD, and then performing the Win10 Upgrade IN-PLACE on the ACTIVATED Win7, should ensure that the Win10, once installed, is ALSO ACTIVATED. (If you don't have a unique Win7 key-code sticker on the side of the PC, this may be the only way to get an activated Win10 installation.)

Once you get Win10 upgrade installed (And it WILL go faster if you use an SSD, by practically an order of magnitude), install all necessary drivers.

So, using the Macrium Reflect rescue USB, once Win10 is installed fully (Drivers, etc.), then make another image backup, to same portable external HDD (or another one, if you filled the first one).

Then take the portable external HDD, with both the pre (Win7) and post (Win10) backups, and burn the 4GB chunks to DVDs (one chunk per disc), or BD-R (5 chunks per disc), or if the backup images were fairly huge, just sell the customer the portable external HDD.

Some notes:

IF doing a Fresh Win10 install w/Win7 key, you could install Macrium Reflect AGAIN into Win10, and make another M.R. Rescue USB based on Win10 and drivers, and also, set up a backup schedule for the user to use, with the portable external HDD that you sold them. (Of course, that might be a danger to the Win7 and Win10 original backups, if M.R. deletes them to make room for newer backups, so possibly, you should squirrel that away somewhere for safe-keeping. Hence the burning of the image file chunks to DVD / BD-R, for permanent archiving.)

Could always buy a cheap external enclosure for original HDD, and store that around too, as a backup, and as a way to access older data files (especially important, if you chose to install Win10 Fresh w/Win7 key).

Also, consider un-installing, or at the very least, updating the Anti-Virus software to the newest edition / version, before upgrading in-place from Win7 to Win10. Having an A/V installed can cause issues, sometimes. Consider un-installing, and then re-installing when done the upgrade.

That's really a good approach. I sometimes use a temporary SSD if I need to rush things along, as mechanical hard drives can quadruple the install time in some cases. Although a lot of people are willing to invest in an SSD upgrade for budget reasons - you can get a 1TB SSD for like $99 these days, along with a 3.5" bay adapter for ten bucks, if required, and RAM is pretty cheap in most cases. I try to get people to jump up to 16GB of RAM whenever possible, just because modern browsers eat so much memory these days. CPU's are typically strong enough to last awhile, especially if they have a quad-core model...not a ton has changed in the past decade since good chips like the Q9550 came out!

 

[VirtualLarry]

Always a class act, @Kaido . I agree with everything, and I strive to provide service as good as you do. I try to push them onto an SSD as well, but that doesn't... always work. (*As I have documented before.)

I agree with the 8GB / SSD minimum requirements, for a "Usable" Win10 browsing experience, except that I'll make exceptions for laptops, with only 4GB max RAM capacity, OR laptops in which is it "too much of a PITA to replace the RAM easily", and ship with at least 4GB.

eMMC-using laptops are another story entirely, and often they only come with 2GB of RAM installed (and soldered). Those are another kind of ugprade hell...

 

[Kaido]

Always a class act, @Kaido . I agree with everything, and I strive to provide service as good as you do. I try to push them onto an SSD as well, but that doesn't... always work. (*As I have documented before.)

I agree with the 8GB / SSD minimum requirements, for a "Usable" Win10 browsing experience, except that I'll make exceptions for laptops, with only 4GB max RAM capacity, OR laptops in which is it "too much of a PITA to replace the RAM easily", and ship with at least 4GB.

eMMC-using laptops are another story entirely, and often they only come with 2GB of RAM installed (and soldered). Those are another kind of ugprade hell...

Yeah I did a couple netbooks recently & they were awful haha. Surprisingly not completely terrible performance, thanks to the eMMC.

On the flip side, low-end computers are getting stupid cheap these days. Walmart regularly has cheapo laptops for $89:

Robot or human?

Comes with a copy of Windows 10 plus a year of Office 365...hard to beat for the money lol. I don't recommend them, but you can get a Compute Stick for like $150 these days with Win10 Pro, a 64GB eMMC, and 4 gigs of RAM:

Amazon.com: Fanless Mini PC,intel Atom Z8350 Computer Stick Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit,4GB DDR 64GB eMMC,4k HD,Bluetooth 4.2,Dual Band WiFi AC: Computers & Accessories

Amazon.com: Fanless Mini PC,intel Atom Z8350 Computer Stick Windows 10 Pro 64 Bit,4GB DDR 64GB eMMC,4k HD,Bluetooth 4.2,Dual Band WiFi AC: Computers & Accessories

www.amazon.com

Or a better model with better cooling for a bit cheaper:

https://www.amazon.com/Fanless-Desktop-Computer-Windows-Mounting/dp/B07QY8LDGX/

For like a grandma Internet-only computer, they're not too bad, although at that point, I would just get a Chromebook or even a Chromestick (~$100).

 

[Fanatical Meat]

@Kaido @VirtualLarry you guys bring up good points. I’m going to guess it is a value model desktop and likely has 4GB or less memory and certainly has a mechanical drive.
This may be an example of just buy a new machine.

 

[Kaido]

@Kaido @VirtualLarry you guys bring up good points. I’m going to guess it is a value model desktop and likely has 4GB or less memory and certainly has a mechanical drive.
This may be an example of just buy a new machine.

Well, if it was built in say the last 5 years, you could get away with an SSD & RAM upgrade & keep on truckin'. Most consumer computers do NOT come with a solid-state boot drive, so even new computers can be really slow. A 500-gig SSD is like $79 these days & you can use Macrium Reflect to clone the internal drive to the SSD drive & be on your way!

 

[VirtualLarry]

"Value Model"... what CPU are we talking about? An E1-2100, Atom J/N-series? Or something like a more reasonable Sandy / Ivy dual-core, or Haswell i3 or something?

 

[Fanatical Meat]

"Value Model"... what CPU are we talking about? An E1-2100, Atom J/N-series? Or something like a more reasonable Sandy / Ivy dual-core, or Haswell i3 or something?

No idea and am making a bunch of assumptions. I think the machine is around 7 years old.
I haven’t seen the machine, she just spoke about getting warnings and seeing stuff in the news about Windows 7 being unsupported.
Lives two doors from my house.

 

[balloonshark]

I just upgraded my Windows 8.1 i5-6600K gaming machine. I'm I right to assume that the MS drivers they installed for 10 need to be replaced with my MB drivers even if some from Gigabyte are a little old? I'll need to grab the latest AMD drivers also right? If so how do I uninstall the all the old drivers that I will replace with my MB drivers?

Are these the drivers I need to install and the order I need to install them in?

https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-Z170XP-SLI-rev-10/support#support-dl

Intel INF installation
Intel Management Engine Interface
AMD drivers
Intel VGA Driver
Intel SATA Preinstall driver (I don't use RAID?)
Intel® Rapid Storage Technology
Asmedia USB 3.1 driver (from 2015)
Realtek Audio Driver
Intel LAN driver

I did update the BIOS to their latest 2018 firmware before I upgraded to Windows 10. Do I need any of the utilities in the link above?

 

[VirtualLarry]

I just upgraded my Windows 8.1 i5-6600K gaming machine. I'm I right to assume that the MS drivers they installed for 10 need to be replaced with my MB drivers even if some from Gigabyte are a little old? I'll need to grab the latest AMD drivers also right? If so how do I uninstall the all the old drivers that I will replace with my MB drivers?

Unless the drivers from Gigabyte were very recently updated (which is RARELY the case), then DON'T use them, use the out-of-the-box Windows 10 drivers (assuming that all the functionality is there is working and not BSOD'ing), as they are generally some of the most current, or at least, more current than most mobo maker's listed drivers, which often stop being updated when the board falls out of "Active maintenance" (generally 1-2 years after release date, sometimes more).

If the drivers that Windows 10 installed, seem kind of old, then go to the actual chipset maker's site to download their newest driver package, for example, www.realtek.com.tw , for audio and NIC drivers, or download.intel.com for Intel NIC or Wifi or BT drivers.

Of course, for AMD and NVidia GPUs, respectively, go to www.amd.com or www.nvidia.com and download the newest up-to-date drivers. The exception is if you have an older HD-series AMD GPU or iGPU, then you might have to rely on the Windows 10 out-of-box drivers.

Edit: Updating Intel iGPU drivers is also important, but most of the time, that happens satisfactorily when using the Windows 10 drivers that come through Windows Update for the iGPUs, no real need to "Seek out" new Intel iGPU drivers in most cases. 0-day gaming releases (if you are one of the rare breed of users that actually games on an Intel iGPU - *shudder*) is one of the few reasons to hit up download.intel.com for newer iGPU drivers. Note that Intel iGPU drivers are not really very "unified" like the Nvidia drivers are, and depending on your iGPU, the game that you want to play, your OS version, and other factors, there may be different Intel iGPU drivers to download. Because decoding that matrix of various facets that govern which Intel iGPU driver to download, that's one reason that I recommend just letting them come in via Windows Update.

 

[balloonshark]

Unless the drivers from Gigabyte were very recently updated (which is RARELY the case), then DON'T use them, use the out-of-the-box Windows 10 drivers (assuming that all the functionality is there is working and not BSOD'ing), as they are generally some of the most current, or at least, more current than most mobo maker's listed drivers, which often stop being updated when the board falls out of "Active maintenance" (generally 1-2 years after release date, sometimes more).

If the drivers that Windows 10 installed, seem kind of old, then go to the actual chipset maker's site to download their newest driver package, for example, www.realtek.com.tw , for audio and NIC drivers, or download.intel.com for Intel NIC or Wifi or BT drivers.

Of course, for AMD and NVidia GPUs, respectively, go to www.amd.com or www.nvidia.com and download the newest up-to-date drivers. The exception is if you have an older HD-series AMD GPU or iGPU, then you might have to rely on the Windows 10 out-of-box drivers.

Edit: Updating Intel iGPU drivers is also important, but most of the time, that happens satisfactorily when using the Windows 10 drivers that come through Windows Update for the iGPUs, no real need to "Seek out" new Intel iGPU drivers in most cases. 0-day gaming releases (if you are one of the rare breed of users that actually games on an Intel iGPU - *shudder*) is one of the few reasons to hit up download.intel.com for newer iGPU drivers. Note that Intel iGPU drivers are not really very "unified" like the Nvidia drivers are, and depending on your iGPU, the game that you want to play, your OS version, and other factors, there may be different Intel iGPU drivers to download. Because decoding that matrix of various facets that govern which Intel iGPU driver to download, that's one reason that I recommend just letting them come in via Windows Update.

Thanks Larry. Installing drivers is the part I dread about new Windows installs. For the chipset drivers I take it I should go with Gigabytes (left side of pic) according to the pic? If so do I need to install all the old ones before installing the new ones? If so is there a way to install them all in one go?

 

[VirtualLarry]

AFAICT, all of those drivers on Gigabyte's site are out of date.

 

[balloonshark]

AFAICT, all of those drivers on Gigabyte's site are out of date.

I just updated the AMD radeon drivers from AMD's site and realtek's from gigabytes site. I guess I'll leave everything else as is. I was able to get RDR2 to run which I couldn't do in Windows 8.1 with AMD's old 2017 drivers.

 

[Kaido]

Still working! Doing a bunch of weekend work to get some remote workers upgraded from Windows 7 and Windows 8 machines to Windows 10.

Bonus, Windows 10 Pro supports multi-monitor RDP for free, unlike say Windows 7, where you had to buy the Ultimate or Enterprise editions to get more than one monitor going for a remote session!

 

[arredondo]

I've almost joined the Win7--->Win10 club. In my other thread, some of you guys helped me transfer my Win7 OS from my old 64GB SSD to my new 512GB SSD to prepare for the OS upgrade. Thanks again.

Before I take that final step, I noticed that my image restoration set up the 64GB C: partition, but the computer is not seeing the other hundreds of GB space. I guess it is just a simple partition allocation issue, but two questions:

1) How much space should I allocate for the Wn10 OS? I used all 64GB for Win7 and it filled up near the brim over the years (deleting AMD driver bloat helped), but I don't know how much this new OS needs, and I want to set up a separate partition this time for a few games that'll be swapped back and forth with the HDD as I play through them.

2) When should I reallocate the drive space - on Win7 right now, or after I upgrade to Win10?

*EDIT*
After some research, I randomly came upon this article which was great at addressing the things to consider for my main question above. So I re-allocated the drive space in Win7 (100GB for the OS C: drive, and 380GB for the new G: partition). That should be plenty for the Win10 upgrade, so here we go...

*FINAL EDIT*
Win10 is up and running. No major problems detected.

 

[Kaido]

Still working! Just did a handful after hours.

Nice thing for Win7 Pro VPN users is that Win10 Pro includes multi-screen VPN. I have a lot of customers taking advantage of the free upgrade from 7/8 to 10 to get more screens at home, since a lot of people will probably be working remotely for at least the next month or two. Nice little perk without having to buy a Win7 Ultimate/Enterprise license to get multi-screen VPN natively!

 

[arredondo]

Multi-screen support works over VPN, eh? That's the one feature I miss while doing remote work at home. Thanks for the heads up.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

Why wouldn't you just use the media creation tool, and put the installer on a USB drive?

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

I just tried this and it downloaded a 5.4GB ISO file. I've never burned dual-layer DVD media before so I now wonder if I can use this with something like a PEN drive.

 

[VirtualLarry]

If your DVD writer drive is current, and you have DVD+R DL discs, ImgBurn (freeware) can burn it to disc rather effortlessly, as far as layer-splitting goes.

Other than that, you can "burn" it to a USB flash drive, using Rufus (again, freeware).

I assume that you chose to download the 32bit+64bit package, generally one or the other is below the 4.5GB mark.

 

[Kaido]

Multi-screen support works over VPN, eh? That's the one feature I miss while doing remote work at home. Thanks for the heads up.

Yup, when you save your RDP shortcut, click on "show options", then the Display tab, then check the box for "use all of my monitors for the remote session". I setup a lot of financial people & DCC workers this way. I had a guy with 4 monitors at his work site and we setup his home office with the same 4 monitors for his financial charts. He's loving it now that our state has non-essential businesses on lockdown!

 

[Kaido]

I just tried this and it downloaded a 5.4GB ISO file. I've never burned dual-layer DVD media before so I now wonder if I can use this with something like a PEN drive.

You can burn it to a USB stick using the Media Creation Tool for Windows 10 here:

Download Windows 10

1. Click on the blue "Download tool now" button
2. It will download a file called "MediaCreationTool1909.exe"
3. Launch it, wait for it to load, and click the Accept button
4. Select the box to create install media (see first screenshot below)
5. Uncheck the box "use recommended options for this PC" & select whatever you want (ex. 64-bit Windows 10) (see second screenshot below)
6. Select USB flash drive (see third screenshot below)
7. Make sure your USB stick is plugged in (8gb minimum), shows up on the list, and then it will wipe it & make a bootable Windows 10 installer for you (takes a bit of time, depending on your PC speed & USB stick speed)

That will let you create a bootable USB stick that will allow you to install Windows 10 on whatever PC you plug it into.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

OK, something must be checking the environment I was doing it in (Linux), because I got nothing like what you folks are showing me. The 32/64-bit versions had separate buttons and could not be selected for both. It then started the d/l ISO file and I was never prompted to burn anything. Whether this was due to my being in Linux at the time I did it, or the fact I had my optical drive disconnected might have prescribed what I saw on the screen that made it different. I'll give it another go in Windows 7 later on.

 

[Steltek]

OK, something must be checking the environment I was doing it in (Linux), because I got nothing like what you folks are showing me. The 32/64-bit versions had separate buttons and could not be selected for both. It then started the d/l ISO file and I was never prompted to burn anything. Whether this was due to my being in Linux at the time I did it, or the fact I had my optical drive disconnected might have prescribed what I saw on the screen that made it different. I'll give it another go in Windows 7 later on.

The website does check that and the end options (ISO vs Media Creation Tool) change depending upon the OS.

If you do it from a non-Windows OS like Linux or Android, it just gives you the ISO. If you do it on a Windows box, the only option you have (without fiddling with the browser agent to fake the website out) is to use the Media Creation Tool as described by @Kaido.

 

[Kaido]

Still workin' like a charm! Updated my neighbor's computer with a fresh MCT USB install using his Windows 7 Pro key.

 

[JEDIYoda]

Still workin' like a charm! Updated my neighbor's computer with a fresh MCT USB install using his Windows 7 Pro key.

what spices did you use>> Did the Cayenne pepper make the computer faster...lolol

 

[Kaido]

what spices did you use>> Did the Cayenne pepper make the computer faster...lolol