Office Starter 2010, compatibility with Windows 10?


  1. Posts : 31,459
    10 Home x64 (22H2) (10 Pro on 2nd pc)
       #1

    Office Starter 2010, compatibility with Windows 10?


    Office Starter 2010 was an option available with OEM pre-installed Office 2010 supplied with a new Windows 7 PC. With a pre-loaded OEM copy of Office 2010 you had the choice, when starting Office for the first time, of purchasing Office 2010 from your OEM or installing the free Office 2010 Starter.

    Microsoft Office Starter 2010 is a simplified, ad-funded version of Microsoft Office 2010 that comes pre-loaded and ready to use on your computer. Office Starter includes the spreadsheet program Microsoft Excel Starter 2010 and the word processing program Microsoft Word Starter 2010.
    Introduction to Office Starter 2010 - Office Support

    From the launch of Windows 10 Microsoft have said that Office 2010 Starter is incompatible and will be removed....

    Is Microsoft Office Starter 2010 compatible with Windows 10?
    Please be aware that Office Starter 2010 is not supported. You will be prompted to remove it before the upgrade starts.
    https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/...5-77b681fe2884

    ...however, due to an oversight (or bug?) at launch the original version of Windows 10 (10240) did not prompt to unistall Office Starter 2010, either through the 'Get Windows 10' app that did the free upgrade, or when using the MCT install media. As a consequence I ended up with a working (and apparently compatible, until now) copy of Office Starter 2010.


    The only proviso was that Office 2010 Starter had to have been installed before upgrading to W10, a condition that has been true since Windows 8.

    In order to use Microsoft Office Starter 2010 in Windows 8, you must first install and update it in Windows 7.
    https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...0-on-windows-8


    All versions of W10 install media from 1511 onwards will require you to uninstall Office 2010 Starter when upgrading from W7/W8, but they ignore it if you are upgrading from an install of W10 that had slipped through the 10240 loophole and retained a working copy of Office 2010 Starter (presumably because as it isn't supposed to be possible, it isn't tested for).

    So, for many years I have had the use of Excel and Word 2010 Starter without issue. then the subtle and apparently unconnected problem began - disk corruption that required SFC/DISM repairs. This first appeared with one of the recent builds of 1809 and has continued into 1903.

    Bree said:
    A case study in using this tutorial.
    For a while now my main machine has been notifying me to restart to repair disk errors...
    .... ....It's unclear how (or when) the corruption occurred. A system crash may have been to blame (or may have been due to the corruption?). Either way, This tutorial has been a complete fix and avoided the need for a clean install.
    Run SFC Command in Windows 10

    Well, the corruption returned (and returned again). The first thought was a dying disk, but restoring the image to a new HDD had the same problem (right down to the same file becoming corrupt every time). It had to be a software problem, restoring the image to a virtual machine would even corrupt the virtual disk after a few days use.

    I went through uninstalling virtually all the OEM software that it had inherited from W7, to no avail. Finally I (reluctantly) uninstalled Office Starter 2010. That seems to have cured it.

    It's a shame to say goodbye to 2010 as it was the most recent(ish) version of MS Office that I had. LibreOffice will have to suffice from now on. TBH I'm surprised I got away with using it for as long as I did, seeing as MS have always said it was incompatible.
      My Computers


  2. Posts : 17,838
    Windows 10
       #2

    I was still using Starter a bit, up until last year, when I bought OHS 2019.
    It's still installed on the lappy.
      My Computer


  3. Posts : 17,838
    Windows 10
       #3

    Hmmm..., interesting!

    Office Starter 2010, compatibility with Windows 10?-001637.png
      My Computer


  4. Posts : 31,459
    10 Home x64 (22H2) (10 Pro on 2nd pc)
    Thread Starter
       #4

    Bree said:
    It's a shame to say goodbye to 2010...
    I may have been premature in condemning Office Starter 2010 as the cause of the ntfs file structure corruption. Some weeks after removing Office Starter 2010 the corruption occurred again. I have now restored back to an image with Starter installed and am investigating other potential culprits.

    The most promising lead seems to be hibernation. The corruption has only ever occurred after resuming from hibernation (but only occasionally, not every time). Even the reduced hibernation used by Fast Start up seems to be capable of causing disk corruption. So far with all hibernation disabled the corruption has not returned.

    My other machines all hibernate without issue, but then they don't have Office Starter 2010 installed. It may be that recent W10 updates have now made hibernation incompatible with Starter 2010.
      My Computers


  5. Posts : 31,459
    10 Home x64 (22H2) (10 Pro on 2nd pc)
    Thread Starter
       #5

    Postscript:


    Bree said:
    .....All versions of W10 install media from 1511 onwards will require you to uninstall Office 2010 Starter when upgrading from W7/W8, but they ignore it if you are upgrading from an install of W10 that had slipped through the 10240 loophole....

    So, for many years I have had the use of Excel and Word 2010 Starter without issue. then the subtle and apparently unconnected problem began - disk corruption that required SFC/DISM repairs. This first appeared with one of the recent builds of 1809 and has continued into 1903.

    ...the corruption returned (and returned again). The first thought was a dying disk, but restoring the image to a new HDD had the same problem (right down to the same file becoming corrupt every time). It had to be a software problem, restoring the image to a virtual machine would even corrupt the virtual disk after a few days use.

    I went through uninstalling virtually all the OEM software that it had inherited from W7, to no avail......
    Bree said:
    I may have been premature in condemning Office Starter 2010 as the cause of the ntfs file structure corruption. Some weeks after removing Office Starter 2010 the corruption occurred again. I have now restored back to an image with Starter installed and am investigating other potential culprits.

    The most promising lead seems to be hibernation. The corruption has only ever occurred after resuming from hibernation (but only occasionally, not every time). Even the reduced hibernation used by Fast Start up seems to be capable of causing disk corruption. So far with all hibernation disabled the corruption has not returned.
    My other machines all hibernate without issue....

    Well, some 18 months later I can confirm that disabling hibernation fixed the ntfs corruption issues - but there have been other issues, most notably occasional BSoD crashes. It appears than over the years of upgrading first from W7 to W10 version 1507 on release, then subsequently to each new version, somewhere along the way (around version 1803/1809?) it had picked up some 'problem' driver and/or obscure registry setting that introduced issues.


    I finally bit the bullet and decided that a rebuild was the only cure.

    Regular system imaging is often recommended on these boards, what is not emphasised so much is the value of keeping some of the older images. I had already tried restoring older system images, but I didn't have any W10 images from more than a year or so ago - all of which contained this obscure bug. What I did still have was the original OEM Windows 7 system, both as a clone on a spare HDD and as system images.

    Rather than a clean install that would have lost me my Office Starter 2010, I restored the most recent Win7 image (from 2016) with the intention of first upgrading to W10 1507 (10240) in order to keep Starter 2010, then to the latest 20H2.

    I spent over a day trying everything I could think of to upgrade to the original release, but every time the upgrade failed with: 'The installation failed in the SAFE_OS phase with an error during APPLY_IMAGE operation'.

    Reluctantly, as a last resort, I gave up all hope of retaining Starter 2010 and tried upgrading Win7 direct to 20H2. I was expecting it to uninstall Starter 2010 as 1511 or later insisted on doing....

    Office Starter 2010, compatibility with Windows 10?-uninstall-starter-2010.jpg

    ...but to my surprise it sailed through the upgrade without a mention, leaving Office Starter 2010 intact and functional. Not only that but Starter's Click-to-Run application manager proceeded to automatically updated it with the most recent (relatively speaking) Office 2010 updates.

    As hoped for and expected, the hibernation ntfs corruption issue was cured (I thoroughly tested that). But there were several other unexpected but welcome surprises. Unlike the previous incarnation in which Windows Update had long ago replaced the audio drivers with a generic Microsoft one, this upgrade path had retained and updated the Conexant Smart Audio (HD) drivers and the features that included. I had the long lost Audio Mixer back again....

    Office Starter 2010, compatibility with Windows 10?-image.png

    Also for the original upgrade path an OEM W7 utility had ceased to work on the upgrade to 20H2. It was Toshiba Disc Creator, useful for creating ISOs from DVDs. In this alternate upgrade path it was still operational.


    What have I learned?

    Well, despite apparently sailing through every Feature Update, there can eventually come a time when a clean(ish) install is the better option.

    Microsoft have apparently finally accepted that Starter 2010 is compatible with Windows 10 (or at least, stopped bothering to check if it's installed).

    The upgrade process is now more robust than it was in the early releases.

    Microsoft's Windows Hardware Compatibility driver catalog has greatly improved since W10 was first released.

    But above all else, the value of making (and keeping) system images.
    Last edited by Bree; 26 Jan 2021 at 15:10.
      My Computers


 

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