On 24/06/2020 15:10, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
My banking app is nagging me to do this, so suppose I must.

I'll do my Win7 Pro laptop first.

Have Googled it, but as usual as many questions as answers.

Ideally, the update would retain all my files data and apps. Obviously
some apps may need updating too - but assume they'd tell me if this is so,
if it doesn't happen by magic?

Ebay has plenty CDs etc for sale for a modest sum that promise to do just
this.

I do have the laptop backed up - using the Win7 facility - to an external
HD. Would I be able to retrieve my files from that if anything goes wrong
to the new Win10 while installing? Or should I do a second backup of the
files I know I might want later? JPGs and so on.

As usual, an idiots guide would be appreciated.

I would start with the media creation tool. If doing more than one
machine, then you have it make a bootable USB drive rather than telling
it to update the machine its on (it will save having to download it
multiple times). Having said that, if you have fast broadband, then you
may not care (it downloads about 3.5G).

Prior to running it, make sure you are up to date with windows update,
and there are none pending on next reboot. If you have optional drivers
than can be updated by windows update, then let it do those.

Run the disk cleanup tool, an let it delete all the temporary files etc.

Once you are ready, boot from the USB drive, and follow the prompts.
Skip entering the serial number.

If you want to use the media creation tool directly, then running it
from an admin level command prompt with the command line:

MediaCreationTool2004 /Action UpgradeNow

will get shot of some of the interactive bits - basically just asking
you to accept the license terms and then getting on with it.

I find with the prep, it takes about 10 to 30 mins of my time per
machine. The process (with decent broadband, i5 CPU and solid state
drive) probably about 40 mins to an hour to complete. Can be quite a bit
longer on slower hardware.

It is successful most of the time, and when it does fail it has always
done so gracefully so far, and restarted back in Win7.

Most of the failures are things like disk space, or somewhat messed up
windows update states. Deleting the whole

C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution

Then re-running windows update will fix most of those. On more obscure
hardware (older laptops etc[1]), deleting the display driver and
reverting to the windows basic display driver before doing the update
can help.

The last gottcha I find now and then is on machines with insufficient
space in the system reserved partition - it needs about 300MB or so of
space. I have posted a procedure for fixing that here in the past.

[1] I did have one dell laptop that booted normally into 10, but then
gave a completely blank screen when it switched to the final desktop
screen. I found it would however let you plug in an external monitor and
could switch to that ok. At that point I had to flash the BIOS to a
later version to fix the internal screen problem.


--
Cheers,

John.

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