Windows 10: New Laptop: Upgrade or Clean Install Windows 10?

what more clarification do you want ? The way windows 10 to work on your machine, is get pass the upgrade from windows 7 or 8 to 10. MS wants to check your license, same as going to a movie, you have to buy the ticket to watch movie.
Second part is the upgrade worked, same as you are in the movie hall. You can watch the show goes on.
Third part is when you clean install, they do not check your license because you are the legit one. Does not matter how many times you clean install on the same machine, it is okay. You are activated for the life of your PC.

 

Hi Word Man, Thanks again for the response.

I am slowly getting it I think.
As per my questions in the previous post here: New Laptop: Upgrade or Clean Install Windows 10? - Windows 10 Forums

For easy reference, these were the questions I had asked earlier:

• What is Windows using to "ID" my machine if it is NOT using my Win 7 Key for the "Clean Install"?
• Is it some sort of "Hash" of the equipment on board that I have now, and will upgrading my HDD to an SSD in the future screw that 'future clean Win 10 Install if that is the case?
• Will the upgrade process rewrite the "Recovery Partition" with the Win 10 files, or will they still be the Win 7 partition files?
  
• Can I burn a "Recovery USB" key for my Win 10 install after Upgrading? How about After a "Clean" install? Would they be the same?

Referring Q1: (and not trying to be pedantic) My machines ID will stay on the MS Activation servers. That I feel better about. I was just curious how it was they were keeping track of my Machines ID.
As well, to be clear, I don't need to keep the win 7 License key / they don't keep checking the win 7 license Key over and over again somehow - is that correct?

Referring to Q3: On a new machine that has a recovery partition, will windows 10 over write that so that an F9 key press will restore the machine from that? Just wondering - I am guessing not.

Referring to Q4: We don't have to worry about burning "Recovery Media" for windows 10 as my macine has been registered on the servers (somehow - I am not sure what it saves) so doing a clean install of Win 10 I simply can use the media creation tool and USB stick to do the clean install.

 

Hey ramram55, thanks for the response.

I guess that was the part I was unclear on (the underlined part above).
. . . how do they know I am "legit"?

Just making sure I fully understand the process, as they have not been very clear on this at all, and I have a few machines that need updating. I just don't want to screw myself in the future because I didn't ask in the past.

It's happened to me before. The devil is in the details.

Thanks.

 

Hi,

Microsoft does not typically release that information. This is because the whole system is designed to protect themselves from piracy. To make the 'small print' available within the public domain would leave themselves extremely vulnerable and prone to attack.

As to the second part of your question. ~I suggest you keep a copy all your original licenses. I know that I am. Human error, program error, data corruption, data loss, malicious hacking or any other type of mishap could occur at the Microsoft servers end. Worst case scenario could be that Microsoft are no longer able to verify your genuine license as the data cannot be retrieved from their servers. Although extremely unlikely, it may be possible that the original license is required by Microsoft again. Call me paranoid if you like, but I always believe in covering my ****!!!

Edit: Re recovery disk. You can do this if you want. My preference though is to have some type of robust backup and imaging procedure in place. As long as I have those backups and images rare eadily available, plus a bootable WinPE or Linux based disk to access the backups then everything is good and my data is secure. The image and backups should obviously NOT be on the same drive as your Windows installation as that would defeat the whole purpose. I never use a recovery partition.

 

Not much too add on this after ramram55 WhyMe covered it. I would second the notion that it would only be prudent to keep a record of your WIn7 product key, just in case - stuff happens.

I'm assuming you're referring here to what I would call a "factory restore" partition. A Win 10 UPGRADE "shouldn't" affect this, a Win 10 CLEAN INSTALL (if you do that AFTER upgrade and confirmed activation) might affect factory restore, especially if you delete all partitions as you are given the opportunity to do during clean install. My recommendation would be to create separate factory restore media and stash it away somewhere, if the manufacturer made provision for that, so that you are no longer dependent on a factory restore partition and it's consumption of some 5-20 GB on your disk.

Your machine's "fingerprint", let's say, has been registered on the MS server and associates with your established activation (again, it's not a solid fingerprint, subject to question usually - so I've read - only if you change the motherboard). Burning Win 10 recovery media (as opposed to manufacturer's out-of-the-box factory restore media) would be more optional at this point in MY way of doing things. However, I use both Macrium Reflect and Image for Linux (Terabyte software) to make full offline (booted to WinPE environment) disk images before I do any of the OS upgrades or clean installs and always have those to fall back on - belts and suspenders both for me.

EDIT: Misattributed something WhyMe said to ramram55 - sorry for MY cornfusion and village idiocy, folks - fixed above.

 

Yes for your experience level perhaps just running the upgrade for the time being would be best. You can always run a clean install once you get a better feel of things. There are some excellent Tutorial here in this forum to guide you. But yes with a Clean install you will need to install all your hardware drivers notebooks can be finicky about drivers.
I would recommend that you download and create the USB install media from http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/softw...load/windows10 then while in windows open up the USB and right click the setup.exe run as administrator and accept the upgrade keeping everything.
I also recommend creating an Image using Macrium Reflect or other back up software before upgrading. Making this Image, should anything go wrong you will have an easy way back to where were before you started. Be sure that you create the restore media for the back up software you use and test it to insure that it boots in to the software program. Depending on what notebook you have either F8, Esc, or some other key pressed while booting the machine will bring up a boot menu, from that menu select the UEFI USB the software should load and allow you to create an image or restore an image among other things.

 

Thanks for all the tips folks.

At the risk of getting to far off of this threads theme, how does Macrium Reflect compare to the Acronis solution?
I know with Acronis you can image an OS from one partition to another (adjusting the UUID of course if you are using GRUB 2 to multi boot). Are you able to do the same thing with "Macrium Reflect" or "Image for Linux" (They seem to have a windows based version as well by the way)?

There are a bunch of new things going on that I have yet to deal with (ie: with UEFI and GPT partitions coming into play) so I am really not sure if those (GPT partitioning in particular) are going to make imaging from one partition to another more challenging, but I'll be interested in hearing if these tools mentioned can manage the task.

Thanks again for all the responses everyone.