Windows 10: Keeping files/programs intact when upgrading from W7 to W10

Hi.
I have a couple questions regarding upgrading from windows 7 to 10.
I was considering upgrading for a while now, but i have one problem. I want to keep my games/programs/files intact when upgrading to windows 10. Now i know that W10 gives you the option to do that anyway, but everyone suggests to transfer everything to a HDD just to be safe. I have one that has just enough space to house the data from my PC but it already has stuff on it from my GFs old PC.

If I create a system image will that delete the files already on the HDD, and will i be able to use it to transfer all of my files/programs intact over to W10 should there be any issues? Is a system image even the best way to do that? I really don't want to go through reinstalling everything again or losing files that i find important. I already tried googling all of this and I'm fairly certain i know how it works but tbh i don't trust my own judgement on these things and I though i might as well get a second opinion on what the best course of action would be.

Help would be highly appreciated.

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:)

 

Will W10 upgrade from W7 keep my programs?

Will W10 upgrade from W7 and W8.1 keep my installed programs or will it be like a clean install losing all my paid for programs and my settings?

Thanks!

 

W7 to W10 upgrade

I have tried to upgrade to W10 home premium from my 64-bit W7 home premium operating system on my laptop. I checked that I meet all requirements and have tried everything anyone ever suggested. I wasted 2 days in December 2015, and still failed.

I had no problem in March 2016 upgrading my desktop W7 Ultimate to W10, so I thought I might try again to upgrade my W7 home premium.

I have now wasted another 2 days in March trying to upgrade the laptop. Either it is a problem with my laptop that the Windows Update Trouble-Shooter does not find, or W7 Home Premium (64) will not upgrade to W10. I give up.

 

Windows Update stalls in fresh W7 install after W10 upgrade. and more things

New user here.
Thanks in advance for your attention and sorry if this was answered already, but I couldn't seem to find it, so here it is.

In the last few days I've had 2 problems with Windows 7 SP1 after a fresh install of W7 and upgrade to W10 in a separate disk that I later just scrapped.
After that, my current W7 installation in a different disk stopped booting and couldn't be fixed and now a fresh install of W7 just won't get updates.

So, here's how I did it.
I have a W7 installation on a 1tb HD, which is my main daily use system. It worked correctly. I have also an SSD that I bought with the intention of using as system disk for speed.
I read that MS uses HWIDs to keep track of whether you can use win10 or not, so I did a fresh install of W7 on that SSD (other disks disconnected so they wouldn't be "touched" by W10 just yet) and then proceeeded to upgrade to W10 from there.
All went fine, W10 installed, I tried it, disliked it and just reconnected the older 1TB drive with my main W7 installation and started using that again. scrapped the files I was interested in keeping from my adventure in win10 from the SSD and erased it. This was about 5 days ago

Now, after using my old W7 for that time, yesterday it just wouldn't boot again. It gives up during the logo screen (the 4 colored light balls that form the glowing windows logo don't even appear) and boots into the emergency repair screen. I tried the automatic repair, the sfc program, system restore. nothing worked.
I must say that I performed several updates and also a number of driver installs (Intel Matrix and Jmicron IDE/SATA), in addition to the w10 try-out, and intially I had no doubt that these were the culprit, but now I'm suspecting something else, because:

Now I've done a new fresh install of W7 SP1 Ultimate x64 (X17-59465) and windows update won't work. At first it says it needs to update the update client/agent, and apparently that succeeds, but when I try to get more updates after that it just doesn't seem to get anywhere. I've left it for more than 1 hour and it just keeps saying "Checking for updates...", the progress bar rolls and nothing happens.

Question is. Since I updated to W10 with this hardware and didn't perform the rollback, could it be that I'm considered W10-bound by MS's servers or something like that? If that's the case, what can I do?
If not, any other ideas?

Also, suggestions on possible ways to recover the older installation where I still have plenty of stuff I want to recover. Not just files, as these are easy to scavenge, but stuff buried within the system that can only be extracted from within the running system, or are much easier to do that way.