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#21
Little wordy :)You can also run it on a VM or plan a dual boot with 7! There are some options available for trying 10 as well as still keeping 7 around! Things to know first?
1)First install of 10 to be a free install? Upgrade over existing or as was done here over temp install of 7 with SP1 still required.
2)Upgrade installs whether downloading the Media Creation Tool or waiting for the download through the Windows updates can prove to be buggy where a second repair install by way of seeing a 10 upgrade over 10 to repair the incomplete initial upgrade or once the upgrade is activated perform a clean install to either a separate partition or drive.
3)When going to upgrade the first time around or when planning a clean install review the guides for this over at Ten Forums as that can save you time and a world of headaches!
4) First backup all of your important files if planning to upgrade over the existing copy of 7 and be sure any additional hard drives without any OS on them are "Unplugged"! as it was fast learned here during the first failed attempts at getting the downloaded and saved to drive ISO disk images written to usb flash drive made bootable by both the MC tool and 3rd party program wouldn't see 10 go on! The boot files ended up on one of the two storage drives that had been since removed and the temp install/recovery folders on the other storage resulting in not seeing 10 go on until review of the clean install guide.
5) When going to check on system hardware compatibility the Windows logo icon will detect and record the hardware information for you and indicate that your system is compatible if you are going to be able to see 10 go on. When clicking to reserve a free copy expect the first of two emails to indicate it has been reserved and a second to come later suggesting not waiting for several days or weeks with a link to the download page for the Media Creation tools which can see an immediate online upgrade, skip to the next option of creating a USB Installation Key with a 4gb flash drive, skip to the next again to see the option to burn to dvd or save as and iso download.
Those screens come after you have selected 10 Home or Pro, 32bit or 64bit or the combination 32/64 download which will not burn to disk but will require at least an 6gb flash drive if you can find one? while 8gb are common place. That's due to the nearly 6gb size of the combined iso download! And of course if you had previously heard that Windows 8 saw the Start menu replaced by the Metro screen you won't have to worry about getting some 3rd party Start menu replacement program as 10 has seen the return of the Start menu!
The new version also has some other interesting features being brought in while performance is close to what you see in 7 due to the new reduction of memory used per process efforts. While 10 is slightly larger to support the dual platform OS strategy of Desktop/Mobile it's not a "resource hog" while the installation takes as long as a rule as it took Vista and 8 didn't get to try 8.1 here at all while 7 on average is only 20 minutes or so seeing the first restart at 12 minutes.
Compatibility? That will always be a problem for any newer version while most everything besides the next newer build for your antivirus or firewall program will likely be a must since 10 is three versions newer then 7. Yet an old Legacy/9x pc game goes right onto the 64bit 10 and runs as usual?! Got to hand it to MS there!
For W7/8/8.1 there are still a few more years of support then we will have to use it. W10 It will only be free for a year.
The only thing I couldn't do however on the laptop after getting rid of the HP bloatwares was resize the OS primary where now I have to go back and nuke the drive entirely to fill in the 17gb space left by the two small parts! Those weren't even recovery partitions but for HP and 3rd party apps only! Can do without those!