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Adventures in space and time - 1607 revisited, then upgraded
Having migrated the installed Windows (along with all its installed apps and user files) from my System One below to a new modern laptop, I'm now clearing out and re-purposing the old one. As it has some installed software I'd like to keep, but that is impossible to reinstall (eg. MS Office Starter 2010) then a clean install of its Windows 10 Home is not my preferred option. Rather, I decides to take it back to it's earliest available system image to avoid any subsequent 'junk' it may have accumulated over multiple feature updates. Luckily I had kept a few system images form its earliest days on Windows 10, I even had an image of it's first 1507 (10240) incarnation. unluckily they were all created using 'Backup & Restore. (Windows 7)'.
The first shock was to re-discover just how clumsy to use and temperamental the MS System Image Restore was in practice. It is really fussy about precisely which version of WinRE recovery environment you boot from to do the restore. A mis-match between the WinRE and the Windows in the system image often leads to the Restore just not seeing the image as available to restore, so not listing it as an available option. After trying many combinations, most of which couldn't find an image to restore, I settled on using a DVD backup set (8 DVDs) of a 1607 image, along with its recovery CD that had been created at the end of system imaging.
The second shock was just how slow it was to restore from DVD.....
After the successful restore, 1607 promptly went about checking for updates. The third shock was just how slowly they installed, and how basic and featureless the Settings app looked, particularly on its Windows Update page. It's not until you step back in time that you realise just how much today's Windows 10 has changed for the better compared to the early releases.
Windows Update of course soon found that it was hopelessly out of date and started to install the 'latest' feature update. Unfortunately it decided that 'latest' meant 1803 and started to download it. I quickly put a stop to that with wushowhide.diacab. Several hours and a lot of updates later it decided that actually 20H2 was now the 'latest' available. That was close enough for me (to update from that to 21H2 is trivially easy) so I let it start the download. I left it to run over night, I wasn't prepared to sit for hours and 'watch paint dry' (again). In the morning I restarted to complete the upgrade. A few hours later it was done, and a couple more checks for updates brought it bang up to date by installing the enablement package for 21H2.
It has been a nostalgic, informative and (for the most part) entertaining trip down memory lane. It does go to show that no matter how old your installed Windows 10 is, it should still be possible to upgrade it direct to the latest version. I would however recommend using an in-place upgrade with an ISO rather than relying on Windows Update. It will certainly be faster and tends to be a more reliable method.
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