Windows 10 – Upgrading another system

Screen_00006

BTW, I have no idea why this system shows an Alienware Logo in the System Control Panel. I have completely swapped out the guts of this system and reinstalled a new copy of Windows 7.

I just upgraded this system to Windows 10 using the DVD burned last time and did the following steps:

  • Backup everything on the system drive from C:\Users\Yournamehere\My Documents etc., if not to another system, at least to one of the data drives.
  • Uninstall any crufty old programs that I’m not going to need in the new world.
  • Reboot
  • Make a record of all the things you have installed by taking screenshots of the “Programs and Features” control panel list.
  • Download the latest Nvidia drivers for the card for both Win 7 x64 and Win 10 x64.
  • Update the [Nvidia 560ti in this case] driver to the latest and greatest for Win 7 x64.
  • Reboot
  • Run setup from the Windows 10 DVD.

And when Windows 10 installs

  • Be careful and customize your settings. You may want to uncheck lots of the options to not share your private information with Microsoft.
  • When you reach the logged desktop, immediately install the new Windows 10 graphics driver.
  • Reboot. Remember last time, the driver was unstable until reboot. Do this just in case.
  • Customize your Start Menu. You may want to play Candy Crush and Minecraft, or not.
  • You may want to sign into your Microsoft account and pay $10 / year for no ads in your Solitaire game, or not.

Screen_00019

Screen_00015

Dealing with Error Boxes

I got the following box when I logged into Windows:

Screen_00011

After some research, I found no good easy answers for removing this left over item from the registry. Didn’t really want to run CCleaner or PCMatic on my pristine new Windows 10 system. But I did find this:

TN Autoruns for Windows

I trust software from Microsoft and especially from Mark Russinovich. Btw, he writes great Cyber Terrorism Fiction too.

Running the Autoruns program, which as you can see is quite recent [ May 2015 ] showed me this, among other things:

Screen_00016

So I right clicked, click yes to running this as administrator, and removed that, and several other entries from the registry where the line was yellow and the file was not found. Some had Wow next to them, but not sure if this is cruft from World of Warcraft or another Wow. Anyway, I get clean logins now.

Disk Space

Windows 7
Windows 7
Windows 10
Windows 10

Recall that this includes a complete set of files that will allow you to roll back to the previous Windows if you need to. These are kept for a while. You have a month to go back to the previous windows system after you install Windows 10.

In looking at the disk space screen shots, it doesn’t look like there is any space used at all. Not sure how they do that..

Looks like it all Works

I use this system for gaming and video production.

The primary interesting applications are:

  • Enmasse Tera
  • Guild Wars 2
  • Fraps to record the games.
  • Corel Video Studio 5 Pro
  • And some other stuff.

I’ve tested Tera, Guild Wars 2, and Fraps. The fraps recordings could not be played with the Movie player – they showed up dark, but the sound was there. But the Windows Media Player played them just fine. So I didn’t really need to install Fraps again. I thought a codec had been trashed by the Windows 10 install, but it looks like all was well except that “Movie Player” can’t play fraps movies. But if you choose WIndows Media player, it’s fine.

Some quick testing of Corel Video Studio shows it seems to work fine. I’ll have to make a DVD and burn it to make sure it all works.

Enjoy. Hope this helps with your Windows 10 upgrade.

– ww