Clean Install Windows 10 Directly without having to Upgrade First  

Here I solved the problem entirely by going out and grabbing a Black Friday discount on 10 Pro and ended up with both the 32bit and 64bit flavors on a single disk unlike what you would have seen with past versions having two separate dvds instead of a single combined disk. Couldn't knock the price any!

Being in a situation where I still plan to keep running 7 I simply elected to buy the 10 license and call it a day. You can always try this as well for the temporary run of 10 to decide which way you will go since you still have the OEM drive if not already reserved as a backup/storage drive for the 8.1/10 dual boot. Running 10 on a VM is another option to mention as well.

You're learning! Most of us have already all too well known you end up with a working OS when not being stuck with upgrade installs.

Buggy! buggy! buggy! is just how they come out for the higher percentages of the time! And it's not only clutter lingering around from the previous version but the upgrade installer itself often forgets to put something on as fully as it should leaving you stuck with the need to see a clean install anyways if not a repair install with a second upgrade over the first.

cpmusic said:

Oh, I've actually known for some time, I was just hoping -- foolishly -- for a short-cut. But I now have a W10 computer that runs well. Windows refused to see the optical drive for a while (a common problem, it seems) but I fixed that through one of the various fixes offered here.

If Microsoft would just stop resetting so much of my installation to default settings with major updates, as it did with 1511, I'd call myself a happy camper.

The first thing I do when first getting either the next version on or simply a fresh clean install being seen to is go into the Disk Management tool and set the drives up placing any software disk in the pair of 24x dvd drives so you can right click on the dvd's volume to assign the drive letter by selecting that option. With multiple hard drives present you will first need to reassign the second one as that will usually grab the D letter before the optical drive. And if you don't set the optical drive's letter right away Windows will simply detect it and assign any available letter other then A, B, (reserved for Floppy) and C used for Windows itself.

MS resetting things a problem? You should automatically be expecting that since you are seeing an OS change even when upgrading over the same version with a newer build. The Windows installer is the culprit there since it only knows defaults and nothing else! "Shame on you Windows installer! You;ve been a bad boy!"

There's a big difference from seeing an OS upgrade to simply tossing on a service pack you have to keep in mind there. A service pack is a rather large patch including a number of individual bug fixes as well as new things being enabled as a particular version develops compared to complete OS change. Even when upgrading from build to build you may end up seeing some things reset to defaults. That's something that will be expected.

As for anything 3rd party the need to see some apps reinstalled has to be expected as well. The upgrade is usually to something that has seen changes made as part of how one partitcular newer version progresses along and may require you to seek out newer versions for softwares you had running either on the previous version you upgraded over or some new change seen with a new build knocks something out it didn't the first time around.

Upgrading builds from one to the next on VMs is fun there since you never know which one will get knocked out while nothing is lost since it is only a VM and not the physical drive seeing the software glitches?! Typically the first upgrade later replaced by a second may see everything carried over which can also include any bugs that came up unnoticed on the previous version's install there!

Those get carried over as well and why the advice of seeing the previous version being reduced as much as possible before upgrading isn't as good as that is supposed to be eithter since you can have a 100% clean install of the older version and still see a buggy mess of a 10 upgrade! Been there done that when 10 was first available!

When planning on running as well as trying out any newer version coming out I first expect that things will need to be tested as I go along and not expect everything to be exactly the same since this is a major overhaul with a brand new OS being looked at. You have to be prepared to start all over from scratch! Even with upgrade installs which can turn out buggy as H you want to be not expecting the world being handed to you but running into something you won't like! That's why software headaches get a nasty rep of being troublesome! Not everything will go as you want it all the time!