Today I performed my first hands-on upgrade of a client’s Win7 machine to Win10. Most of the time it should just adopt the Win7 license, but this one was hacked, so it required a new key. It was about $2 on eBay; perfectly legal and legit. I bought it from a system builder and it worked just fine.
The installer told me it was going to wipe the applications and config files, and keep only the user files. Actually, it kept the entire Win7 file system and stuffed it under “Windows.old” in the new file system. The apps were still there and most would still work, but the configs were missing. I had backed hers up and copied them back in place in her “AppData” folder in the right places (Local, LocalLow and Roaming). What I didn’t realize was that in about ten days, Win10 is going to delete that entire Windows.old folder. So I now have to go back and reinstall everything that still runs okay from there. That’s pretty easy in this case; the client uses her system for almost nothing but email and to play some music and games.
Other than that, it appears everything went just fine. It took a couple of hours because I was being cautious. You can get the details on how to do this and where to get the installer from ZDNet.
