I finally did a clean installed of Windows 10 on my HP ENVY laptop

I have a HP ENVY Touchsmart Sleek book laptop. Model M6-K125dx which had Windows 8.1 OEM version installed.
I do not have any DVD drive so everything must be by USB at the moment.
I cleaned out most of all thejunk and made copies of my data on the HD prior to updating to Windows 10.

My plan was to install Windows10 and get it registered with Microsoft then to make a HD backup image of thesystem and the partitions.
Made sure I had everything running prior to making the image backup using Win10 backup.
This went as according to plan without any issues and used a 32gig USB 3 thumb drive which used about 24 gig which included the OLDWindows directory.
After I made the HD image Idownloaded the MS Media Creator Tool and ran it and selected I wanted to make a Win10 copy for another computer.
I used a 8 gig USB thumb drive for that.
After the copy was properly installedon the 8 gig drive I rebooted and hit ESC to access the thumb drive.

It loaded and I was able to reformattedthe whole 650gig HD for my clean install.
No problems installing andwhen it was online it acquired the proper MS code saying it was an active copy.
Just thought you want to hearabout OEM laptops and how to get your clean install.

That`s exactly how it should have went, excellent job :)

winxp said:

It's always nice when things work out as planned.
So many folks are having issues and all I can think is that their Windows 7 or 8 was having issues before they installed Windows 10 and now they surfaced.
I always believed after being in computers since late 1970's a clean install is worth the effort and time even if you have to reinstall your additional software.
Good Luck All.

Yes, good job!

It's amazing (or not, considering how not very well Microsoft communicated on this) how many posts I see of people who took a perfectly well activated Win 7/7 SP1 or Win 8/8.1 system and jumped right into a clean install of Win10, not realizing 1) they should have backed up their data for restore and been prepared to reinstall all their programs with license keys and 2) had no idea that you have to do the textbook UPGRADE to Win 10 first and confirm activation BEFORE doing the clean install (those without retail licenses of Win 10 in hand).

You don't know what you don't know, I guess, and I put that down to poor communication (for many) on Microsoft's part.