I installed Windows 10 on my laptop which had 8.1, 64-bit with absolutely no problems. It only took about an hour. All my programs (including Office 2003) were maintained and work perfectly.
I now am deciding to upgrade my desktop with 7 Home Premium, 64 bit, that has all the same programs installed. My hesitation is due to the age of the desktop. It was built in 2009.
Does anyone have any experience in this area they could share?
Worked fine on my desktop that I built in 2009 from Windows 7. I would suggest you make an image of your existing operating system with something like Macrium Reflect Free before you upgrade.
Thanks for the quick response and the help. I'll give "Macrium Reflect Free" a shot.
You didn't mention it, but if the Win7 machine came preinstall, that makes it OEM -- and the deluge of postings on OEM forums indicates that OEM machines are having more problems than others. Sony and Toshiba are telling folks to hold off on Upgrading and the HP forums are swamped with upgrade-related problems.
If you can't make an Image backup with Macrium, I'd hold off on the Upgrade -- if it's an OEM machine.
I bought a Dell Optiplex 790 refurbished desktop (refurbished directly from Dell) a few months ago. It was mfg in 2011 and returned from a business lease and refurbished and re-sold. It came with Windows 7 Pro OEM x64 from Dell. The bios was really old (version A07). I upgraded the bios to the latest (A18) and made sure all of the Windows 7 Pro updates were loaded. I also made sure all of the latest Windows 7 Dell drivers were loaded. The Windows 10 Pro upgrade went smoothly with no problems.
It was a clean install of Windows 7 Pro OEM x64 that I started with. I would recommend a clean install of Windows 7 or 8.1 prior to a Windows 10 upgrade, in order to have the least number of problems.
Finally bit the bullet and upgraded the desktop. Much smother than I thought, but it took longer and the restarts held a dark screen for a much longer time. So long, that I almost turned off the machine during the process.
My recommendation would be to start the process and walk away for a couple of hours. Come back and check. Then walk away for an hour.
Absolutely right. I see it so often that people start doing stupid things because they think...well, I don't know, what they think. The real problem in such cases often simply is that their machine is not as fast as they want it to be. If they had just waited, that would have saved trouble.
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