Windows 10: Upgrading Windows 7 SP1 to Windows 10 without Win10 drivers

I have upgraded several PC's to Windows 10 and I am down to my last 3 that are Windows 7-era machines.

Two are home-built PC's running Windows 7 SP1 64bit and 32 bit. In this case the motherboard manufacturers have no windows 8 or 10 drivers. So no chipset, on-board audio, or Ethernet drivers, etc. The video cards are more current so I can get those.

The Dell is an older laptop that is running windows 7 SP1 that I fresh-installed upon receipt. Again, no Windows 10 drivers or support for that either on the Dell site. So "not certified" to upgrade to windows 10.

I have read both success and failures when trying to just let the upgrade find drivers or just use the old drivers. My question is if you are an experienced user, is there a good possibility of success upgrading this way or is it not worth the hassle? Now the hardware will pass the minimum requirements so my fear is someone will just click on the "upgrade icon" and it will happen when I am not around anyway.

Thanks for any thoughts or experiences.



PS. How do you access your "auto-saved" posts. I lost the whole post while typing and it was "auto-saved" but could not see where to access it.

:)

 

Windows 10 Pro Key ??

Windows 10 activates without a product key if you upgrade a computer that is running Windows 7 SP1 or Windows 8.1 at the time it is upgraded.

 

Windows 10 BootLoop after reset

I fixed the dinasour pc. All I did was do a clean install of Window 7 SP1 activated it without installing anything else then I did a in place upgrade of Windows 10. The only thing I had to do after was install the Nvidia driver.

 

I would suggest: before you upgrade, make an image of the existing hard drive with Macrium Reflect free. You'll need an external USB hard drive large enough to hold the image which will be about 80-90% in size of the used space on you existing hard drive. Also make a Macrium Reflect free rescue USB flash drive, DVD or CD.

Do the in place upgrade. Personally, almost all of us regular members here prefer to use a Windows 10 installation USB flash drive or DVD created from Media Creation Tool or from an ISO from Microsoft Tech Bench. But you can try the Windows update Get Windows X icon.

After the upgrade, you hopefully will not have any unknown devices or exclamation points in device manager. After the upgrade, I would export the third party drivers using the DISM /Export-Driver command so that you will have them if you decide to do a clean install after the upgrade.

The oldest computer I have upgraded is an Acer Aspire One that originally came with Windows XP from Acer and it is running great on Windows 10.

 

Hi,

If that's the case as it can often be, I suggest firing up device manager and let Windows search online for an appropriate driver for the device (s). That often works in most cases but unfortunately not all.

Cheers, *Wink

 

Thanks. Yes I always use the media creation tool. And for sure, always image before I upgrade.

 

Will do, thanks. Is prowling OEM sites like Realtek for audio or others for wifi drivers better or worse than trying thr Windows update driver in DM?

 

It depends on the device I would think, for most going right to the device manufacturer is best. My HP laptop got a windows 10 graphics driver that is only available through winupdate, and it is preferable over the regular drivers from amd because of all the extra features (like the screen dim/brighten buttons that only work with the hp driver). Aside from graphics though device manufacturer all the way *Biggrin

 

Thanks. I guess I should have said chip manufacturer. In my case Dell and Mboard manufacturers have nothing.