So then, last month of free Win 10 upgrade

[suicidal_monkey]

The Win 10 upgrade dialog keeps popping up on my aged laptop, telling me it's compatible, and great, and shiny, etc etc. Thing is, Sony have sort of given up supporting my laptop as it is so old - on their compatibility check site my laptop is in the "too old, we probably didn't check, so assume it won't work" section.

Will I really gain much through upgrading (assuming it works and the drivers are okay) from 7 to 10, ...and does anyone know what the likelihood is of being able to revert back to 7 without any serious problems? Also, any idea if  I will be able to revert it back at a later date (in 6 months time for example).

:flirty:

[BrotherTobious]

I am upgrading this weekend mate will let you know

[Liberator]

Having had about 5 failed attempts on a laptop after fully installing and doing it's final boots, it managed to fall back to Win7 automatically every time. I eventually tracked it down to a USB video device that had drivers loaded and once I uninstalled it the thing upgraded and stayed there, it's been okay since.

My main PC has a modified registry that defaults most stuff that's not OS related to the D:\ drive, a few weeks back I upgraded it and it flew through, there were no major issues and it retained all my modifications.

Upgraded my Mums laptop a week back and that's also fine.

One thing to note after you have done it is that Microsoft like to try and take control of your logins, make careful note of the dialogues when you play around with XBOX live app and the Microsoft store, it defaults to trying to change your login to their Live system. So it it asks you for your local PC login password when you are doing something, read the text fully.

Also download the ISO and run it off a USB, quicker and you have it to hand.

[smilodon]

Also run this app to remove all the Windows Spyware. W10 is a great OS as long as you make sure you know what you are and are not leaking to Microsoft.

https://www.safer-networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon/

[Neys]

I'd recommend staying with win7 as long as possible, if you don't have a *real* need for upgrading. Though win10 is shiny and nice when using it, there are some things I particularly dislike compared to win7:

- Automatic updates are hard to impossible to turn off. And I mean really automatic. No questioning, no postpone option. Automatic. It depends a little on the version (Home, Professional, ...), but all in all the updates are always a huge pain.

- Win10 comes with lots of very questionable spyware tools which are enabled by default. The tool mentioned by smilodon might help or it might not. The thing is, you can't know if there is not yet another program not disabled correctly. Nor if one of the said updates installs a new one or re-enables already disabled ones. I don't trust MS anymore after what they did with win10.

- I'm using hibernate mode a lot. Have done this also on win7. Now, with win10, MS thought it was a good idea to automatically boot the PC in the middle of the night to check for updates, do admin stuff and I don't want to know what more. I digged a lot in the internet and finally managed to turn off this ****. There are surprisingly many hidden options regarding this. You have to touch all of them. Then, next automatic update, guess what happened. PC boots automatically again. This really ****ed me off.

All in all, I hate it.

[Gone_Away]

Also run this app to remove all the Windows Spyware. W10 is a great OS as long as you make sure you know what you are and are not leaking to Microsoft.

https://www.safer-networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon/

Thanks for that Smilo!

[suicidal_monkey]

Useful thoughts and links. Thank ppl


On a related note, if I do install it but find after 1 month (past the upgrade time limit) that drivers are missing (or some other issue) ... Does anyone know if I will still be able to revert back to W7

[BrotherTobious]

I think wipe and if you have install media.
I took the plunge and it took ages but only did a upgrade.

Now getting used to it most things seem to work but you can't say when you want to dl and install updates. And a few other bits but I will get there am sure.

[Tutonic]

AFAIK you cannot 'roll back' the upgrade to W10, and I wouldn't recommend you do anyway. It'll be a format & full reinstall job if you want to go back to W7 I'm afraid.

If you're worried, take a disk image backup of you drive - then you can just restore it over the top of W10 to go back to where you were.

[suicidal_monkey]

To take a "disk image" ...what software will do this best? :flirty:

[Tutonic]

Clonezilla is a good free one.

[suicidal_monkey]

Thanks all :cheers:

I'll plan to give this a go sometime next week/end