It's been awhile since this thread was active, but with Win 7 no longer being supported, I had several extended family members reach out to me in a panic. I decided it's time to bite the bullet and upgrade my Win 7 Pro engraving computer just to get it over with.
The Windows 10 free upgrade does still work. Since I had multiple computers to upgrade, I launched the Win10 Installation Media upgrade tool to create a USB drive that I could boot from. That USB drive worked flawlessly for the laptops and my desktop computer.
I fully expected problems with my engraving computer since I have several old WinXP programs on it. I used Macruim Reflect to create a clone of my current Win 7 drive just in case things went horribly wrong. While I could have done a clean Win10 install, I didn't want to have to re-install all the software and configure/personalize them, so I figured I would sacrifice some hard drive space with an upgrade. After the Win10 Pro install was finished, I was very surprised to discover the upgrade did not gobble up drive space!
For those of you hesitating to upgrade because of all your personalized settings and engraving files, I was pleasantly surprised to discover all of my software and settings, print drivers and network settings remained intact! I was able to open Corel X6 and do a test engrave, open my 2004 Quickbooks, Office 2010, and all my other software without any problems.
It did take up about 5 hours of my day working on the upgrade for my engraving computer, but that also included uninstalling all the xbox, games and other unwanted software that was installed with Win 10.
I read recipes the same way I read science fiction. I get to the end and I think, "Well, that’s not going to happen."
That's been my experience, also. I replaced a laptop with a SATA SSD drive with one with an NVMe drive and if it's faster, it's not by much. By that, I mean faster booting and faster loading of programs. The programs I use are fairly simple, such as photo editing, word processing, spreadsheet, etc. Maybe something that was heavily disk oriented would see an improvement.
And it's an i7 processor for the new laptop.
I helped a friend and installed a SATA SSD drive in her Pentium computer to replace a mechanical drive. That made a BIG difference.
Mike
Last edited by Mike Henderson; 01-20-2020 at 10:14 AM.
Go into the world and do well. But more importantly, go into the world and do good.
Yes, updates happen regularly. And there is an option to create a "install thumb/flash drive" which I also did as a recovery option if needed later.
If you find yourself doing Windows 10 upgrades frequently, it's a good idea to always download the Windows 10 Media Creation Tool from Microsoft. You can use this to create a USB thumb drive for install (both clean install and upgrades), and it will use the latest Windows image when it creates the install media, which will save you a lot of download time when you go to install the Windows updates on your newly updated machine. There's nothing worse than upgrading your Windows 7 machine to Windows 10, only to find out that you installed version 1803, and now have to update to 1809, then 1903, then 1909....
Derek
Last edited by Kev Williams; 01-21-2020 at 8:02 PM.
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ELEVEN - rotary cutter tool machines
FOUR - CO2 lasers
THREE- make that FOUR now - fiber lasers
ONE - vinyl cutter
CASmate, Corel, Gravostyle
Yoga class makes me feel like a total stud, mostly because I'm about as flexible as a 2x4.
"Design"? Possibly. "Intelligent"? Sure doesn't look like it from this angle.
We used to be hunter gatherers. Now we're shopper borrowers.
The three most important words in the English language: "Front Towards Enemy".
The world makes a lot more sense when you remember that Butthead was the smart one.
You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much ammo.
I'm glad this thread started. I downloaded the windows.iso and have it handy in case my wife's or daughter's win 10 laptops go belly up. Even if becomes out of date at least they can get started again.
My own laptop runs win 8.1, the AMD processor is none to swoft and uses a lot of power not doing much. Even if I can still do it for free I'm not sure if updating it is worthwhile. I *might* try it and if I don't like the result revert it back to windows 8.1.
I'm in an updating mood. The desktop computer is 64 bit but I had installed a 32 bit version of linux on it (Debian Jessie). I just updated it to 64 bit Linux Mint Tessa (Mate desktop of course) and everything went without a hiccup.
-Tom
Can't believe I'm even considering this, but because I have an HP Win8 desktop with a dead hard drive that (a) in HP's infinite wisdom, instead of supplying a recovery DVD they put the recovery program on the hard drive - and (b) in Microsoft's infinite quest to obsolete perfectly good 5 year old equipment, made it nearly impossible to install win7 on a win8 computer so I'm not going to try--I'm likely to break down and put an SSD in the HP and put Win10 on it. My HP Win10 laptop- originally Win8- is so excruciatingly slow I can't imagine doing TurboTax on the thing. I don't know if it has a problem or what, but the desktop DID at least work reasonably decent with Win8(.1)... I'm curious if 10 will turn it into quicksand. I'm also curious if I can actually still upgrade for free. Guess I should order that SSD
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ELEVEN - rotary cutter tool machines
FOUR - CO2 lasers
THREE- make that FOUR now - fiber lasers
ONE - vinyl cutter
CASmate, Corel, Gravostyle
I'm sort of at peace with the idea that there are still people out there who think Win7 is better than Win10. (In fact, one of them lives with me, but that case has more to do with a couple of much-loved apps that she's never upgraded from their XP-era versions.)
That said, is there really anybody who thinks Win8 is better than Win10?!? Win8 is kind of the Windows ME of this century, lacking only the Paperclip Dude.
Yoga class makes me feel like a total stud, mostly because I'm about as flexible as a 2x4.
"Design"? Possibly. "Intelligent"? Sure doesn't look like it from this angle.
We used to be hunter gatherers. Now we're shopper borrowers.
The three most important words in the English language: "Front Towards Enemy".
The world makes a lot more sense when you remember that Butthead was the smart one.
You can never be too rich, too thin, or have too much ammo.