Windows 10: Windows 10 Upgrade process

I'm hoping someone can tell me how the Win10 upgrade works in terms of optimization. Does it tune-up or defragment my HDD in any way. Essentially what I'm saying is that, after upgrading to Win10 from Win7 Home premium, there was a significant performance upgrade. I'm both thrilled and a little wary in the face of that. The tech savvy consumer in me would basically just like to know what went down during the upgrade.

I hope this isn't too much for one question (first time poster) but I'd also like to know if Win10 does any virus scanning or cleaning during the installation or if problems such as malware & spyware remain after upgrading and must be removed manually?

Lastly, I'd like to know how WIN10 handles product licensing, specifically where the product key is located on the OS.

To the gent or lady who can answer these for me, you have my sincere thanks!

:)

 

Windows10 upgrade

 

Missing Operating System after Windows 10 download

Is there anywhere to download replacement OS for Windows 7 Home Premium? Mine crashed on Windows 10 upgrade.

 

Isn't that one of the reasons for developing and users to install new versions of programs/operating systems - to improve performance? I don't know if it defrags or optimizes the hard drive files but I have thought that the 7 computers I have upgraded have been running faster.

No, the upgrade itself does not do any malware/spyware checking or removal. A clean install will get rid of 99% of viruses and such, but you lose everything else too, of course.

Use a product key sniffer such as produkey or showkey. Your Windows 10 Home license key will be exactly the same as millions of other Windows 10 Home users. Once you upgrade, Windows 10 creates a unique and anonymous Product ID generated from your hardware configuration. It accesses the license information from the old operating system while upgrading to allow the new Product ID to be sent to the Microsoft Activation Servers where the Product ID is stored for future activations.

Every time Windows 10 starts, it will check your hardware configuration and if the major components are the same it will generate the same Product ID and stay activated. If you change your motherboard (or clone the disk and put the clone in a second computer) the Product ID calculated will be different and Windows 10 will de-activate itself. If you do a clean install, you skip manually entering the Product Key and Windows 10 will calculate the same Product ID it had before based off your hardware, which will be the same one saved on Microsoft Activation Servers and it will re-activate itself with a generic Product Key that 99% of Windows 10 Home versions now have.

Microsoft has discovered that preventing piracy by the use of Product Key sharing is too costly and ineffective to pursue, except in the most extreme cases - so they have moved to the Product ID activation method now. Do not confuse the terms Product Key and Product ID - they are two different numbers. Product Key is the old 5x5 alphanumeric string that used to be printed on the labels and later stored in BIOS. Product ID is calculated by Windows and based mostly upon your hardware configuration and hardware serial numbers.

 

Actually, Product ID is just the numerical representation of the product key.

http://www.licenturion.com/xp/fully-licensed-wpa.txt

As can be seen, the (Raw) Product Key plays an important role in
generating the Product ID.

>>>> Product Key

The Raw Product Key is buried inside the Product Key that is printed
on the sticker distributed with each Windows XP CD. It consists of
five alphanumeric strings separated by '-' characters, where each
string is composed of five characters, as in

FFFFF-GGGGG-HHHHH-JJJJJ-KKKKK [/quote] There is, however, an extended product ID which is much longer, and we don't really know what the format of this is.

 

Oops. So it is either the Installation ID (IID) or extended product ID which Windows 10 calculates from the hardware configure and compares, not the Product ID.

I am assuming most of this (if not all) has carried forward to Windows 10:
Microsoft Corporation

and

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