4 beginner questions: Home-Pro, Recovery Drive, 32 GB eMMC, drivers

Some beginner questions about 10. Did some reading on the forums, some important questions still left. (I thought I will just wait until Threshold 2 to come out to install it)

1. Comparing Home and Pro (and Education and Enterprise): all the ISOs are the same size. I see no benefit for the Pro for my personal use over the Home. (Enterprise or Education would be nice, but it's unavailable)

Will the Home take up less space on the drive and be more fast on a slower system than the Pro?

2. I'm planning to have Windows 10 on 2 machines: one older laptop and a new "Windows with Bing" one I will buy in the near future, presumably coming with 10 preinstalled on its 32 GB eMMC drive. if I understand, WIMboot is phased out by 10 (I will upgrade, I mean, will do a clean 10 install from my 7 system; I completely skipped 8).

The question (regarding installing on the old laptop first): what's the difference between a 10 Recovery Drive created from Control Panel and the clean ISO? First I have to install from the clean ISO obviously, then I can create a Recovery Drive from Control Panel, but later can I use the same Recovery Drive USB for clean installations as well?

3. Any information on available on how Windows 10 installations work on these 32 GB small drive machines? How do I recover, do a clean install, and how do they save space by default? I understand there is a commend with which you can compress a 10 install on a large drive, but I suppose the installs on these small drives should be compressed by default, even if you do a new, clean install. I also understand that you can 'reset' Windows 10.

4. (Speaking of my upcoming small laptop with 32 GB eMMC and Bing Windows 10) Are computer manufacturers ship stock Windows 10 ISOs (you can download from Microsoft's site) or do they modify it to include their drivers (good) and crapware (bad). Sure, they have to add their drivers, but what software they provide and in what fashion altogether is not a done deal.

1. Home will take up less space than pro, not sure how much less space. It will not run faster or slower than pro. (In fact, running home might take up less resources than pro because of the extra services pro has to run - so home might gain a slight performance edge over pro).

2. If you want Windows 10 activated for free, make sure you do an upgrade first - or capture the genuineticket.xml file (procedure for that on this forum in tutorials). If you have the install media created (USB/DVD), I don't see any reason to make a recovery drive. As far as I know the recovery drive has no additional or less capabilities than the install media does. The only time I make an actual recovery drive is when I get a new computer and I use the manufacturer's software to retain all the drivers and crapware on a backup.

3. I just purchased a Nextbook Flexx 10 from WalMart. It came with Windows 8.1 Bing. Make sure you make an image of that before you mess around with upgrading because you can't download a Windows 8.1 Bing ISO anywhere that I have found. I just used Macrium Reflect free to make the image of the entire hard drive into one file. I suppose making a recovery drive before upgrading would work to.

When I upgraded the Windows 8.1 to Windows 10, I ended up with an additional 500mb recovery partition and the factory 5+ GB recovery partition was left intact. On 32GB eMMC machines Windows 10 will install in a compressed state by default, whether it is upgrade or clean install. A Windows 10 ISO from the computer manufacturer should include their drivers and crapware and be specific to the make and model computer they are providing it for.

When I did a clean install of Windows 10 to the Nextbook Flexx there were several drivers missing. I did not bother with trying to find them all. I restored the Windows 8.1 image I had made, upgraded again, ran Windows disk cleanup in the "remove system files" mode and it seemed to do a great job getting rid the old Windows 8.1. The only driver then that I had to find and install was one for the G sensor that controlled screen rotation. The only driver I could find that worked correctly was one that someone had posted specifically for the Flexx 10. I could not get the driver from the sensor manufacturer to work correctly (wrong screen orientation).

Also, when I did a clean install of Windows 10 I ended up with a system reserved boot partition, 128mb empty space, the OS partition, and a 500mb Recovery partition. My next step is going to be to delete the recovery partitions because I have both the image of the original 8.1 made with Reflect and the Windows 10 install media and also an image of the Windows 10 after I got the screen rotation driver installed. Then I am going to attempt to move the boot files to the OS partition and get rid of the extra boot partition and 128mb free space. Don't know how that work yet.

If you end up messing up the eMMC and can't boot - the way I found to force booting from the USB is to hold both the Power button and I think volume down together and it will boot from the USB. (might be volume up). That's on the Nextbook Flexx 10. I really like the little tablet so far.

Put it this way - Macrium Reflect Free has never failed me yet. So it is my choice of a KNOWN backup system that works. Also notice this from my post:

The only time I make an actual recovery drive is when I get a new computer and I use the manufacturer's software to retain all the drivers and crapware on a backup.

The recovery drive may be much smaller in size than a Macrium Reflect image - but the Macrium Reflect image takes much less time to restore the entire hard drive because it is just a copy of files, whereas a restore from the Recovery drive means it has to go through the installation process. Also with a Macrium Reflect image - when you do a clean install of Windows 10 and it is missing a driver - most times you can mount the Macrium Reflect image as a virtual drive and point Windows 10 to the Windows directory on the virtual drive and let it search for and use the driver that it finds there. And when you forget to make a backup copy of that family photo that you downloaded from your phone ---- it's on the Macrium image - not the recovery drive. It's a matter of personal choice and what you hope to be able to do with your backup.

Kyhi said:

When you FIRST get your Windows with BING Edition - Create a Recovery Drive
This will allow the Factory Image to be saved onto a USB and it is much smaller in size then a Macrium System Image...

The MAIN reason for doing this is because the BING edition is not available for download...

This is very essential to have in case something goes wrong, like Microsoft screws up your Windows 10 activation - because that is about the only way you will have a Windows 8.1 to fall back on without ordering recovery media from the manufacturer.

I didn't look completely through the factory install, but I did not notice any additional software added by Nextbook on the Flexx 10 other than hardware drivers.

@NavyLCDR @Kyhi

Thanks for your tips!

- I didn't know about the Nextbook brand; it looks interesting! (Strange thing: they offer Chromebooks as well, though this brand is not featured on Google's Chromebook page. Regarding my planned netbook purchase... I changed my mind, upped my plans a bit.

- I have bad experiences with Marcium imaging back with Windows 7

- Here's an article on the Windows 10 Feature: CompactOS

- Yep, I did some digging around and I am already somewhat familiar with the activation process with genuineticket.xml

OK, I will come back with possible live questions after Threshold 2 comes out. That's the first one I do care to install on anything. Some time next Tuesday?

Kyhi said:

The biggest concern I have within this forum - is those that choose to express their personal choice over a KNOWN working Bare Metal Reset Recovery option.. PBR Recovery is the same method used on the FACTORY Production Floor..
But, Of course, most forum users know more then the OEM Manufactures..

Oops. Do you refer to @NavyLCDR, correct?

NavyLCDR said:

1. Home will take up less space than pro, not sure how much less space. It will not run faster or slower than pro. (In fact, running home might take up less resources than pro because of the extra services pro has to run - so home might gain a slight performance edge over pro).

So,

- Home over Pro should give me a slight improvement.

Similarly, I ask

- Will N (EU) version also give me a slight improvement? As I will use everything as 'Portable Apps' on a Deep Freeze system anyways

- Will a Single Language (US English) give me any slight improvement? As I am not planning to use any other languages than US English.

By slight improvement I mean, it can be either
- Memory
- Disk space
- Battery life

Even if any of these will give me 1% improvement, it's more than worth it.

Okay, as we narrowed it down, the only question is, which is the the proper ISO I'll need? (EU N with US English (retail?), if everything above is correct)

To follow up: Windows Media creation tool asks me to have 8 GB of space on the system drive to download the ISO. which I don't have, because I didn't size the system drive to store large ISO files in the first place. If Microsoft were a little more flexible and offering me to save the ISO to "D:". I need an alternative solution.

What version of Windows do you have a product key for?