Windows 10

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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I'm curious how many apps you have installed and if any are older 32-bit ones. Every time I change OS some of the older apps or devices no longer work. Will my Win 7 printer drivers be OK?

Windows hasn't had a significant change to its driver model since Vista was released.
There certainly are cases where arbitrary support limits keeping older software from working on newer OSes and Adobe is often right on the forefront of that, but the only applications of which I am aware that have some kind of compatibility issue with Windows 10 have networking-related hooks. They're VPN and Firewall packages, not content creation apps.
 

Handruin

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I still have the icon saying I'm waiting for the upgrade but I haven't been able to upgrade yet. I really haven't had the time to bother anyway but maybe in the next month or two I'll give it a try.
 

ddrueding

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I still have the icon saying I'm waiting for the upgrade but I haven't been able to upgrade yet. I really haven't had the time to bother anyway but maybe in the next month or two I'll give it a try.

Mine was the same, so I downloaded the Media Creation Tool (linked above) and manually did the upgrade.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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My new favorite upgrade bug: The Shell Experience Service eating about 90% of an i7's CPU time. The fix: Go in to Settings, Personalization, Color and disable the option to automatically change the tint of Windows to match your wallpaper.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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I have 72 Windows 10 machines now instead of 72 Windows 8.1 machines. One note I have about my deployment is that it's a good idea to pin Control Panel to the Start Menu. Half the crap in Settings will just open Control Panel and my users still prefer it to opening and searching the Settings list.

One kind of neat thing I didn't see in the testing versions of Windows 10 is that, upon plugging in an Android or iFruit, 10 will offer to install the various Microsoft apps for that platform. I like the acknowledgement and willingness to work with those other platforms even if I don't particularly care for most of Microsoft's Android software; Microsoft's stuff DOES work well on Android, but it also still refuses to work with Google's ecosystem and that's decidedly less cool. Word for Android for instance will save to Dropbox or Onedrive but not Google Drive. It does or could nicely solve the problem of mobile device sync for a lot of people who don't understand or want to use Apple or Google's tools though.
 

sedrosken

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I in particular use OneDrive just because its the only thing I can get to work with literally anything with a little elbow grease. Onedrive-d on linux, while not perfect, is more than good enough for me. Everything else (that i use with any regularity) has a native application.
 

Clocker

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So...I have upgraded to Win10 w/o any issues.

I forced the upgrade using the media creation tool. I then replaced my 256GB Crucial M4 SSD with a 500GB Samsung 850 EVO. Also replaced the 3x Seagate 3TB drives with 2x Hitachi 4TB units. With that hardware installed, I fresh installed Win10 Pro afterward using the USB stick the media creation tool created for me. It automagically discovered my Product key. Everything is working great. Very happy with it so far.
 

Clocker

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Well hey a legal copy of Windows Server 2016 will only cost you about $600 + $30/user so I have no idea why you wouldn't just be jumping all over that. ;)

Upon initializing my two 4TB Hitachi disks in Win10, I was reminded that Windows Dynamic Disks allow mirroring, striping, spanning and even Raid 5. So I am mirroring the two Hitachi disks together. Seamless and easy.
 

Clocker

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I don't think so because I used the same USB stick for my laptop as well as desktop. MSFT must save something about your hardware on their servers.
 

mubs

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Thanks. I'll be downloading once and updating the laptop and desktop as well.

Anybody know for sure, please let me know.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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How? Does it save the win 8.1 / Win 7 key on the media created, and use that when clean installing Win 10?

The way I understand it, if the same activation code is generated on a machine where Windows 10 has previously been installed, Microsoft activates that code automatically without need for a key. You can still retrieve the official key if you want it but since the overwhelming majority of Windows 10 installs at this point are upgrades and upgrades are supposed to be tied to a single combination of hardware, I'm not sure how far you'd get trying to re-activate a key on a machine with hardware changes.

Once 10 has been activated, you can do a clean install and all will be well, so it's in your interest to do the 10 upgrade even if you don't REALLY want it, just in case someone else might want to in the future.
 

Clocker

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Likely it read the oem key out of the bios. Clocker, can you confirm this is an oem machine?

My machine was built by me. Not OEM. Asus P8Z77V, i5 3570k, GTX970, 16GB RAM.

As mentioned earler, after I did the 'upgrade' I removed my SSD (Crucial) and 3 HDDs (Seagate) and replaced them with 2 new HDDs (HGST) and a new SSD (Samsung) and then did the fresh install. No complaints about the hardware not matching so it must be tied to something on the motherboard, I guess.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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Hardware activation consists of 10 hashed hardware ID#s. Six of them are typically motherboard components, though you can game that a little by using an add-on rather than integrated NIC for your primary network connection and/or an add-on graphics card at build time. A system needs to be reactivated if IIRC more than five of those hardware IDs change. Those rules have been fairly constant since Windows XP was introduced.
 

Howell

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My machine was built by me. Not OEM. Asus P8Z77V, i5 3570k, GTX970, 16GB RAM.

As mentioned earler, after I did the 'upgrade' I removed my SSD (Crucial) and 3 HDDs (Seagate) and replaced them with 2 new HDDs (HGST) and a new SSD (Samsung) and then did the fresh install. No complaints about the hardware not matching so it must be tied to something on the motherboard, I guess.

Wait, how far did you get into the 10 install process before swapping out the hardware? All the way through?
 

Clocker

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Wait, how far did you get into the 10 install process before swapping out the hardware? All the way through?

I started with Win8 in my machine. I did the upgrade to Win10 to activate my Win10 upgrade. Shut the machine down. Swapped out all my drives. Did the Win10 fresh install (with the USB stick media) with the new, unformatted drives installed. Done.
 

ddrueding

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For the record, I had a Win10 upgrade fail earlier that was resolved by uninstalling Daemon Tools. Not surprising, just a heads-up.
 

Bozo

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If I understand correctly, if I upgrade a Win 7 install, I can then use the install media (a DVD) to format that upgrade, and install a fresh copy of Win 10, no questions ask? As long as it's the same hardware?

Does this work on a virtual machine.
 

Bozo

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If you would like to clean up the Win 10 install, use 'Disk Cleanup' from the properties menu. If you select to delete system files it will remove Windows.old and all the setup crap. In my case it cut the Win 10 footprint in half.
 

mubs

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Merc, thanks for the clarification.

Clocker! My confusion was that you did a fresh install from the downloaded media without doing the upgrade first. That's why I was wondering if the media creation process wrote the win 7 / 8 key to the media for use during the win 10 clean install process. Now that you mention that you did the upgrade first, there's no confusion anymore.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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If I understand correctly, if I upgrade a Win 7 install, I can then use the install media (a DVD) to format that upgrade, and install a fresh copy of Win 10, no questions ask? As long as it's the same hardware?

Does this work on a virtual machine.

Part one yes, part two no, unless you're fresh installing inside the VM.
 

CougTek

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In case anyone wonders why the internet is so slow today, let me remind you that it's Patch Tuesday so that Microsoft and Windows 10 computers with their default WU distribution settings are flooding the Net with prehemptive Windows 10 installations files and updates.

Thank you so much Microsoft for making web surfing such a miserable experience for most of us.
 

LunarMist

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In case anyone wonders why the internet is so slow today, let me remind you that it's Patch Tuesday so that Microsoft and Windows 10 computers with their default WU distribution settings are flooding the Net with prehemptive Windows 10 installations files and updates.

Thank you so much Microsoft for making web surfing such a miserable experience for most of us.

Is that caused by some buggers in the updates or just the normal updates?
 

CougTek

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I don't know for sure, but my theory is that they miscalculated the impact of their new updates distribution system combined with pushing down users' throats the Windows 10 installation files.
 

mubs

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There are also reports of a KB for Win-10 that does not install properly. So Win-10 reboots, un-installs it. Then finds an update pending, so installs it. And goes on doing it. Not all systems, some. Still, since updates atr forced on Home/Pro versions, this ain't a good thing. Hopefully it's only early glitches and will get ironed out.
 

LunarMist

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There are also reports of a KB for Win-10 that does not install properly. So Win-10 reboots, un-installs it. Then finds an update pending, so installs it. And goes on doing it. Not all systems, some. Still, since updates atr forced on Home/Pro versions, this ain't a good thing. Hopefully it's only early glitches and will get ironed out.

At this rate I'm waiting until July 2016, just before the upgrades expire.
 

mubs

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I understand a major update (similar to service pack) will occur to W-10 early next year. A month after that would probably be good to upgrade to W-10.
 

Howell

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My understanding is that if get it for free you have no choice but to accept the updates. If you are a part of a corporate agreement or are joined to a domain you have a choice. At least that is my understanding. MS has not been completely clear and even contradictory.
 
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