Before you upgrade your Windows 7 SP1 system to Windows 10
Audience:
Home users
Applies to:
Windows 7 SP1
Originally published June 2nd 2015. Updated June 22nd, 2015.
A couple of weekends ago, I helped my neighbor who happens to be a teacher in K-12 upgrade to Windows 10 Technical Preview.
Here are some lessons learned:
1) Make sure that you have important documents such as pictures, tax returns, financial documents, and other important documents are backed up. And test restoring it.
2) Make sure that you have a copy of the OEM installation of Windows 7.
3) Make sure that you have a copy of all the applications that are important to you and/or were installed.
4) Updated the bios and firmware from the OEM hardware manufacturer to the latest.
5) The machine had 2 GB of RAM, and it was paging quite a bit. I recommended them adding at least an additional 2 GB, they opted for an additional 4GB of RAM for a total of 6GB.
6) The machine was 3 years old, with the OEM SATA hard drive, from my past experiences, hard drives start having mechanical failures when they get to the 3-6 year mark. So I recommended them a new SSD drive to provide the performance. They opted to add a 128 GB which is pretty reasonably priced nowadays. And we moved the original SATA hard drive to the secondary SATA connection.
If you decide to upgrade:
Note: Do not proceed with an upgrade if you have issues with your current Windows 7 SP1. This is probably a good time to start from a clean slate. What issues? If it’s infected with adware/malware or the hard drive is making ‘clicking’ noises, etc…
7) Before you upgrade your Windows 7 SP1 system to Windows 10, here are some items to keep in mind:
- Make sure your drivers and firmware's are up to date.
- You might want to unplug your accessories:
External DVD-burner
External USB drive
External USB hub
External MIC/Speakers
External SD card readers
External Smart card readers
etc…
8) Update your antivirus definitions
Run a full antivirus scan.
Uninstall your antivirus since more than likely it (the filter driver) won’t be compatible.
Note: You might want to unplug your network cable from your network card and if a laptop/tablet disable the wireless network.
9) Free up disk space
Then run a “disk cleanup”, step by step is available here:
10) Make sure that your disk drive doesn’t have issues
Run a “Check Disk”
Start, CMD (Run As Administrator)
chkdsk.exe /f c:
12) Install the Rollup Update for Windows 7 SP1, which has whole bunch of fixes, including WMI which is used extensively during driver discovery.
2775511 An enterprise hotfix rollup is available for Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1
13) To make sure that the Windows Update engine is at the latest, install 3050265 Windows Update Client for Windows 7
14) Go thru the “Windows Update” process of installing “Windows 10”.
15) Check to see if you really need .Net Framework 1.1:
Remember, you will have a free upgrade for 1 year which starts on July 29, 2015.
I hope this helps,
Yong