Windows 10: Reinstalling Win10 on a sequentially upgraded computer

Hello,

I'm facing this situation:

My computer started ~7 years ago with AMD processor, 8 GBs of RAM, classic HDDs, and over the years, pretty much everything in it underwent replacement - it's now a Core-i5 including new motherboard, more memory, new SSDs, graphics card etc.

On the Operating System side, it began as Windows 7, and went through the free upgrade to Windows 8 and then to Windows 10.


However, it fails when trying to apply the 2020 patches for Windows 10 with some obscure error code.

I would like to reinstall Windows 10 to sort of give the machine "a new start", but there are several complications:

1. I really need to keep Windows Movie Maker available. This software has been discontinued by Microsoft, so how do I reinstall it after an OS reinstall?

2. There's legal software on the PC which I no longer have installation media for. Again, how do I keep this?

3. Is there any guarantee that reinstalling Windows 10 would resolve the issue of not being able to apply the May 2020 update?

:)

 

Why has Windows 10 slowed my computer so much?

If you upgraded to Win10 with MBAM installed, it's very possible that the OS upgrade messed up something with MBAM.
(It was/is M$ "best practices" to temporarily uninstall your AV, AM and other security programs before upgrading to Win10, to minimize the chance of such corruption.)

Either way, for starters, I suggest a proper, clean MBAM reinstall.
I suggest carefully following ALL of the steps here: MBAM Clean Removal Process 2x.
Pointers:

• Please be sure you have your license info handy before you start
• Please be sure to deactivate your account before you uninstall (dashboard > "my account" > "deactivate")
• Please be sure to reboot when prompted by the removal tool
• It's a good idea to reboot again after the reinstall

Please let us know if that resolves your issue.

Thanks,
MM

 

Upgrading Non-sequential builds


If you have build 9841 installed and try upgrading to build 9879 via the normal upgrade path, you'll get this:

This upgrade path is not supported. Please close Setup and relaunch from the root of the media or go back and pick a different installation choice.

However you can upgrade by running setupprep.exe instead (from sources folder). This will launch the Refresh process (via a Windows 8 splash screen, no less) and you can then follow the prompts:

 

Win10 Anniversary upgrade

Hello - I'm trying to upgrade to the Win10 Anniversary on a client's laptop. The laptop previously had Symantec Endpoint Protection, but it was removed before the free upgrade was performed from win7 home edition. The copy of SEP was not compatible with
the upgrade to Win10, but it was supposedly successfully removed.

Now the Anniversary upgrade stops and reports that it can't continue due to incompatibility with SEP. I've checked the startup, there's no SEP listed, there's no active SEP components listed under the task manager, and I'm unable to manually remove registry
keys through the regedit program.

So: would it be possible to:

Roll back to the previous win edition, reinstall SEP, then remove SEP, and upgrade to Win10 again?

Manually edit the registry (assuming that I can find the offending key(s)) so the installation can complete?

I don't have access to the latest copy of clean wipe, so I'm not sure that would help.

Please provide any suggestions and thanks in advance

Bill