Windows 10: Windows 10 Upgrade was bad ! Clean install was great!

No, my board doesn't have a key on it. You can skip, because you can enter it later. But you don't have to, when you have done this upgrade. "Skip" also works when you install it in a virtual machine - and that doesn't contain a valid license.

 

Upgrades worked fine for me on all systems. Didn't even bother clean installing.

Windows 10 pulled updated drivers, so replaced my depreciated Win7 wifi drivers and such. Meant that there were no driver conflicts.

 

It turns out that there another way that MS has to validate a computer, your MS store account. When you log into your MS account, MS recognizes the stored code for your hardware and uses that to validate the OS. this was new to me, I just learned about it today from user bobkn:

Windows 10 Tip: Associate Your PC with Your Free Windows 10 License - Thurrott.com

 

Where do people get this nonsense from...? Well you can't just make this stuff up now can you...*What

T.

 

just update and then reset the PC, it should do the trick *Smile

 

I thought that we would get a free Win10 license number for every one of our Win7/8.1 license numbers for a long, long time. I blame the media for the initial headline like "FREE Windows 10". MS was really no help as they did not explain this whole upgrade thing very well until just before the launch. I can completely understand that it still is a controversial issue with a lot of people believing that as long as they have a retail version of Win7/8.1, they can do what they want with Win10.

 

Frankly speaking, I wasn't aware the key was stored on the motherboard.
I am not an expert on this, really I am not. It may very well be true.
Sofar I believed the activation took place based on the combination of key and hardware-id's.

 

Back on topic after derailment.

Same here. I came from a very clean Windows 7 system and the update gave me numerous BSOD, unclean and unfixable task scheduler, many different errors in the system logs, uncorrectable corruption found by sfc, and hangs. I did a clean install and everything is fine, except it has taken me days to get all my programs, music, etc, back in place. Still installing loose ends.

I think many of your average joe with ill-maintained computers will run into this and won't be able to fresh install or recover their system to their satisfaction.

 

Same here. It took me too days to get my windows as I want with all my programs installed and personalized. But once done, WHAT a pleasure to have this nice clean windows. The upgraded pc was a mess full of errors and no way to fix. Now I do not advise everyone to do this! If you don't know what you're doing just stick to upgraded windows.
But if you can spend some time doing a clean install its damn worth it.

Once windows is ready and updated and personalized I made an backup image and now I can restore anytime.

 

I think part of the problem might be that people are upgrading without their computers being as clean and stable as they could be to begin with.

Before I upgrade, I run Windows update several times to be sure I have all the updates to my old OS in place. Then I run disk cleanup with the system files option. I run CCleaner both to delete what files it finds and fix the registry several times until it finds no more errors. Then I delete system restore points.

After I upgrade, I do the exact same process again. I haven't noticed any difference in performance or error rates between that method and clean installs and it sure beats restoring all my programs and data.

 

What is this, a CCleaner cleaner option?

 

Mine was clean and rock solid stable, I keep a very tight ship. Made no difference. The update was fubar.

 

Well, in my case, I did the same, but Win10 could not able to take Display driver (nvidia) and internet (neither ethernet, nor wireless).

Trying to revert back the upgrade.

 

And back off topic, I found that the MSDM table on the BIOS (which is where my Win8.1 key was located) no longer exists after upgrading to Win10. I used Read Write Everything to look. The only other place it could be now is stored on your MS account in the cloud. So a clean install of Win10 on a previously upgraded machine would need to log into your MS account to activate.

 

No this is windows disk cleaner. just type "disk cleanup" in windows 10 search bar and it will come up.
Windows 7 and 8 had it too.