Ready to upgrade but driver concerns

safe01 said:

There's only one reason I'm thinking of upgrading - W7 support ends in Jan 2020. I'm very happy with W7 and it probably suits my ageing laptop better than W10. If I could be certain my laptop wouldn't make it to 2020 I wouldn't upgrade.

If I was in your place I might want to add a little more ram ....if you can ...4GB is right at the bottom ....kinda :)

One problem quite typical of upgrading older laptops to newer OS's for which they are not specified is that, although the OS runs, thermal management doesn't work properly. That reduces the life of the laptop.

For example my HP laptop which came with Vista ran Win 8, then Win 10 32 bits and 64 bits, but from Win 8 up I experienced thermal cutouts very quickly in Safe Mode, and sometimes in other circumstances, e.g. a particular boot disk. (4Gb was ok - some people are upgrading netbooks with 1Gb- the min. in the spec. for Win 10).

(Sure, there are other reasons for older laptops getting hot, but dust doesn't explain it cutting out so quickly in Safe Mode!)

Disk imaging programs will let you create a folder and name the file created which will contain your image. Other files and folders are untouched.

A very useful trick is to plug in your external drive, run diskmgmt.msc, apply a drive letter like R (late in the alphabet) to your external drive.

Next time you plug it in, it will be R.
That way the path always matches your backup settings in the imaging program, making life easier.

Macrium Reflect allows you to manage how many backups you keep for a given disk or partition, controlling the space used. You may prefer to do a system image for Windows, and image data partitions or disks separately.

safe01 said:

Apologies for the simple question, but I have an external hard drive with plenty of space but it also has a lot of valuable files on it. If I use this drive to backup with Macrium Reflect, does it reformat the drive and delete these valuable files or can they be retained?

Macrium Reflect will not reformat your external drive safe01 :) It will just make an image file of your Windows OS and place the file anywhere you tell it too. Your external drive is a excellent choice. :)