The upgrade process
You no doubt have heard that Microsoft’s next operating system, Windows 10 is out and is a free upgrade for those using Windows 7 or Windows 8.1. The upgrade is free for those who take advantage of it during a one year period starting July 29, 2015. If you do then you do not have to pay after the one year period is up. Microsoft has indicated that after this one year grace period they will charge for Windows 10 upgrades. In general people with Windows 7/8.1 Home will get a free upgrade to Windows 10 Home while those on Windows 7/8.1 Pro get Windows 10 Pro.
The upgrade process can take several forms. One is the little white Windows logo in the lower right corner of Windows 7/8.1 in the taskbar. This allows you to reserve your copy of Windows 10 which will download behind the scene and alert you when it was ready to install. Here at Grebar Systems we have 5 Windows 7 machines that have had this icon in the system tray for weeks prior to Windows 10 official release. One computer has the $WINDOWS.~BT directory (10GB in space) at root of C: which has the installation file as well as the hidden folder $Windows.~WS. This is to allow you to roll back to your existing version of Windows should you want to. We have yet to see any notification window pop up indicating that Windows 10 is ready to install. Microsoft is rolling out these types of upgrades in stages so it may take a while to see this happen.
The other upgrade method is to download the Windows10 Media Creator tool . The download process will create a MediaCreationTool.exe in the folder you specified. Running this application will allow you to do 2 things. You can either upgrade the PC on which the application is running to Windows 10 or you can use it to create Windows 10 installation media for another PC. The installation media option gives you the options to select language, Windows 10 Home or Windows 10 Pro, 32 bit/64 bit or both 32 and 64 bit. Download can take the form of an ISO file (that would need to be burnt to DVD) or t create a bootable installer on a USB flash drive.
NOTE: If you select both 32 and 64 bit combined download in the form of an ISO file you will need to use a dual layer DVD to burn the ISO. That is because the file is over 5GB in size and will not fit on normal single sided DVDs.
The free Windows 10 is for upgrading a earlier version of Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 you must first use the upgrade option even if you plan to do a clean install of Windows 10. A post in a Microsoft forum explains it this way
“Once your device upgrades to Windows 10 using the free upgrade offer and activates online automatically, an entitlement is registered to your PC’s hardware for your edition of Windows 10. (If you go to Settings >> Update & Security >> Activation says ‘Windows is activated.’) Now you will be able to clean install (i.e. boot from media and install Windows 10) the same edition of Windows 10 seamlessly without having to enter a product key.”
This is because you do not receive a Windows 10 product key and you can’t use your existing Windows 7/8.1 during a clean install. Microsoft generates a hash of hardware and other components on the system being upgraded, registers that hash on their server for that system. This process will allow you to reinstall Windows 10 on this same hardware down the road. After the upgrade process completes your system should authenticate after a while. Only after you have verified that your upgraded Windows 10 is authenticated with Microsoft should you attempt to do a clean install.
“You CANNOT activate Windows 10 using a Windows 7 or Windows 8/8.1 product key. Upgraded Windows 10 PCs do NOT use unique product keys for Activation – all upgraded Windows 10 PCs use the same generic product key that activates ONLY if you launched upgrade while booted in your Windows 7/8 system.
Keep in mind that if the hardware configuration of your Windows 10 device changes significantly (e.g. motherboard change) Windows 10 may require re-activation on the device. This is the same experience as prior versions of Windows (e.g. Windows 7 and Windows 8.1) and you’ll need to contact Support.”
The easiest way to do a clean install after doing an upgrade to Windows 10 is to use a process that was first introduced in Windows 8, Resetting your system.
For a good explanation on how to do reset your Windows 10 system so that it acts like a clean install see this article. It also explains how to start the upgrade process as well as how to download and create the Windows 10 installation media. This media can be used later should you need to reinstall Windows 10 for whatever reason. I must emphasize as does that article that one has to first perform an in place upgrade of an existing Windows 7 or 8.1 system even if you want to do a clean installation of Windows 10. Even though there is a process of reverting back to your earlier version of Windows it is strongly suggested to do a backup of all your data. Even better would be to create an image or clone your C: drive to allow you to easily revert back to your existing Windows version should the rollback process fail.
The need for doing an upgrade first is because you do not a product key to enter during the clean install and only the upgrade process generates this key behind the scenes. If you do not do an upgrade first your subsequent clean installs will never authenticate with Microsoft thereby rendering your Windows 10 install illegal.
Installing Windows 10 using the media creation tool
Should you upgrade?
If you current have Windows 8.1 and you can’t stand its charm bar or metro apps maybe. I say maybe because even though myself and countless others who were members of the Windows Insider program since last year had tested various builds of Windows 10 and seen it progress to the operating system it is today there may be some gotchas. You do have a year to take advantage of the free upgrade to Windows 10 for Windows 7 and 8.1 users. Beware though that if you are using Windows Media Center in either Window 7 or 8.1 that WMC is no longer supported in Windows 10.
Upgrade gotchas
During the upgrade of a test box which had Windows 7 Pro 64 bit and my laptop which had Windows 7 Home 64 bit I did encounter a couple of upgrade gotchas. On the Pro system I was using a hard drive monitoring program which seemed to be causing excessive problems with Windows 10 so I had to uninstall that along with an older version of a file archive program called Winrar.
On the laptop which had a 2-year-old install of Windows 7, the upgrade did not improve the slow boot up of the system. On that system I encountered a problem with the free version of Stardock’s Fences program which caused the icons on my Windows desktop not to show up. Uninstalling that software solved the problem. Once I confirmed that the version of Windows 10 had been authenticated properly I performed a clean install using the reinstall method. Once that completed it was then I encountered another issue with my Broadcom wireless network card. It would lose the connection to my Wi-Fi router and not reconnect. I reinstalled the HP supplied Windows 7 driver via compatibility mode and that problem seem to been fixed.
My suggestion is for people to sit back and wait for the dust to settle and any bugs discovered by the general release of Windows 10 to the public to be ironed out before upgrading. As with any Windows release the best speed improvement is experienced by performing a clean install of the operating system. This removes the bloat that has accumulated over the years and gives you a clean slate to work with. However that means you will have to back up your data at least once or preferably twice just to make sure. It will also need you to reinstall all of your applications or programs that you use. I always suggest to people taking this route, to install the applications as you need them.
Modern UI Apps need some updates too
Although the Modern UI (formerly known as Metro) applications are not as noticable as they were in Windows 8.x they still exist in Windows 10. Most new users to Windows 10 that skipped over Windows 8.x entirely may not realize that the Modern UI apps are updating independently of those on the normal Windows desktop side. In order to update Modern UI apps click on Windows Store icon (shopping bag icon) in the all applications list. This will open up the Microsoft Store application from where one can download free and paid Modern UI applications. If you look up in the upper right corner of the Windows Store (under the search box) you may see a downward pointing arrow with an underscore under the arrowhead. This indicates that there are updates to the Modern UI applications that ship with Windows 10.
If you do not see an arrow, either click on the icon (to the left of the search box in Windows Store app) that looks like the outline of a person or the graphic you supplied to personalize your Windows 10 account. Select Download menu item to check for updates and to download them.