So Very Disappointed With Win 10

sdowney717 said:

What I had to do to get win10. granted I am not well versed in windows activations, I ended up with an activated win10.

I had a PC with win 8.1 pro activated. Before I did anything, I used belarc to get the installed key. I then upgraded to win 10.
Then I shrunk the drive, wanted to make two partitions on the drive and also to clone the install in case the drive self destructed, so I have backup plug and play.
The shrink process failed and win 10 pro no longer worked
So I decided to clean install 8.1 pro, I downloaded from MS. When asked for the key, I entered the key Belarc reported.
It worked and activated win 8.1 pro.
I then shrunk the drive using minitool partition wizard, that worked.
Then I upgraded again to win 10, that activated.
Then I cloned the drive with minitool partition wizard
Now both the original drive and the clone work, plug in either one and it boots to win 10 and shows activated.

I also tested out the system reset before the upgrade on win 8.1 and it worked I went through a lot of wondering if it would work, I thought it should work, eventually it did work. This upgrade befudlement ended up taking 2 days of my time to figure it out.

Nothing out of the ordinary there. If your Windows 10 was activated after the upgrade you could have skipped doing the upgrade the second time. You could have just clean installed on that same PC. You just click skip when prompted for the product code. A hardware ID was created the first time you activated on that PC. That is used the second time around to verify that PC is authorized for a Windows 10 install. It will activate just fine. I've verified it myself.

Geeezzzzz You know I came here for some help and advice. Yes and to voice my opinion about Win 10

Some of you guys/girls really and truly tried to help. I had several great suggestions on what to and just my luck I picked the wrong one. I did a system Restore thinking I was going back to Win 7 when in all actuality all it did was give me a VERY clean install of Win 10 and I lost everything except my pictures.. (whew) I was way better off then I was before I came here, even though I had a OS that I did not like.......

SO to those who tried to help I thank you for your sincere attempt to help me and I would like to see the Moderators of this forum give you a GREAT BIG ATTA-PERSON

And for the rest of you who choose to use this thread to wine and cry about their own problems I say get a LIFE and start your own thread.........

All system restore points are erased when you upgrade from one OS to another. Then new oneas are created over time. I'm talking about the Windows System Restore, not the factory restore/recovery. You can undo a system restore, you just run it again and pick a different restore point. In a lot of cases, the OEM factory recovery partition is left intact, but the link to it is broken during the upgrade. The key press on boot up to access it doesn't work anymore. It sounds like you actually did a Windows 10 Reset. That will wipe out any installed programs and Apps and just leave your files intact. That's what it did for me when I ran it. On the plus side, for me, it fixed another issue I had with live tiles being broken, and some tiles with no icons. It looks like the Windows 8.1 Refresh option is gone now.

I am a personal friend of LeeB's and last night did a TeamViewer session with him. During the session, I found that it appears that his Windows.old folder is intact but there is no longer a Restore option to take it back to his Win 7 installation. He is traveling and doesn't have his WIn 7 install disk with him. It's my understanding that if he boots with his Win 7 install disk he could then recover Win 7 from the Windows.old folder. Is that correct?

Is there a way to re-enable the Restore option or any other way so that he could try to revert back to Win 7 without the install disk?

He also has a System Image on an external hard drive (from 2011 when he first got the laptop) as a last resort he would like to know how he can recover that system image. I believe he needs the Win 7 install disk to do that which is something he doesn't have with him. He doesn't have reliable internet so would prefer not to have to download a large ISO file and burn a disk.

Anybody got any ideas to help? Lee currently won't have an internet connection until next week so hopefully we can come up with a solution for him for when he gets back on-line.

Was the system image made with Win7's own backup?
If so he only needs to pop in the Windows 7 system repair disk(he did create on and still has it, or?), and then find the image and reimage to his system disk.
The repair disk never failed me back when I used to test "optimizing" software and 3rd party themes.