Reinstalling Windows 10

Z

zahratustra

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Son of a friend of mine updated his Windows 7 to 10 but (apparently) started having problems with some of his games and so he reinstalled W7. He is now thinking about W10 again... Can upgrade again or was it just one shot deal?
 
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If it was upgraded already, just do the clean win10 install (boot from USB or optical media, format C: then install - you can create bootable media from win10 installation with microsoft's util or Rufus).
The fresh installation will, after it's done and win10 gets connected to internet, activate automatically.
No need to repeat the upgrade process.

The deal is still available and any upgrade to win10 is free till next summer.

Dunno if it's important, but key resellers offer win10 pro keys for some small price (g2a, instantgaming, kinguin), 10-20 bucks. Dind't try any of those so can't say for sure if they work or are a scam.
 
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Thanks joxer!
 
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Also, another cheap way to get another license is go to your local electronics recycler. Often they'll have desktops for dirt cheap which still have the Windows 7 OEM license sticker on them. Much cheaper then buying an OS license, plus you can pick between Win7 and Win10.
 
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Haven't thought of that. Great idea Caddy!
 
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Well, the other day I encountered a poor soul who fell for the "Easy" update to windows 10, and I had the unfortunate role to try and help him after he made this horrible mistake. Not only did he lose a lot of his games, it also deleted a lot of his programs, and many of them doesn't even work after reinstall. He almost cried in despair when I told him it is probable not possible to downgrade again.

On top of that the OS was horrible in every imaginable way, slow, ugly, troublesome, a new IE ( well, it is called something else ) that is even more horrible than the old one.

I cannot comprehend as to why anyone would want to update to this shit….

I am still thankfull that he took the bullet now I'll be Windows 7 until it goes out of support! Here is hoping a windows 11 is around the corner.. and hopefully that OS is not complete crap! Hope MS will bury windows 10 and start over.


If it is not clear yet.. my recommendation is just stick with Windows 7 and don't bother reinstalling windows 10 crap.
 
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LOL
It's possible to revert back to previous state, no need to reinstall win7.

For applications/games compatibility, you should check that BEFORE upgrading.
Keep in mind also that if you disable UAC completely on win10, half of programs, old or new, won't work.
 
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GothicGothicness said:
Well, the other day I encountered a poor soul who fell for the "Easy" update to windows 10, and I had the unfortunate role to try and help him after he made this horrible mistake. Not only did he lose a lot of his games, it also deleted a lot of his programs, and many of them doesn't even work after reinstall. He almost cried in despair when I told him it is probable not possible to downgrade again.

On top of that the OS was horrible in every imaginable way, slow, ugly, troublesome, a new IE ( well, it is called something else ) that is even more horrible than the old one.

I cannot comprehend as to why anyone would want to update to this shit….

I am still thankfull that he took the bullet now I'll be Windows 7 until it goes out of support! Here is hoping a windows 11 is around the corner.. and hopefully that OS is not complete crap! Hope MS will bury windows 10 and start over.


If it is not clear yet.. my recommendation is just stick with Windows 7 and don't bother reinstalling windows 10 crap.
Click to expand...

On the flip side, I've upgraded to 10 on 4 pc's without an issue and was actually surprise at how well it worked. Haven't had any programs not work either but I haven't tried anything old.

Windows 10 is MS best OS to date IMO and certainly isn't crap. It's very similar to Windows 7 and just a bit faster. I would have no qualms about recommending it to friends and family. Having said that there's nothing so amazing about it that one would need to rush out and upgrade. If your happy with 7 stay with it ( I'd upgrade before the 1 year though to get 10 free) if you want to upgrade I see no reason not to.

As with all software there will be some horror stories if you look though. Make sure you take the usual precautions and back up everything.
 
joxer said:
LOL
It's possible to revert back to previous state, no need to reinstall win7.

For applications/games compatibility, you should check that BEFORE upgrading.
Keep in mind also that if you disable UAC completely on win10, half of programs, old or new, won't work.
Click to expand...

It is possible to revert to previous state? how ??

sakichop said:
On the flip side, I've upgraded to 10 on 4 pc's without an issue and was actually surprise at how well it worked. Haven't had any programs not work either but I haven't tried anything old.

Windows 10 is MS best OS to date IMO and certainly isn't crap. It's very similar to Windows 7 and just a bit faster. I would have no qualms about recommending it to friends and family. Having said that there's nothing so amazing about it that one would need to rush out and upgrade. If your happy with 7 stay with it ( I'd upgrade before the 1 year though to get 10 free) if you want to upgrade I see no reason not to.

As with all software there will be some horror stories if you look though. Make sure you take the usual precautions and back up everything.
Click to expand...

Well, I am sure it is not just his laptop who is having this horror story.. even on a place like Code Project which is very MS friendly you can see all sorts of horror stories. For example there was recent win 10 auto-update which caused the network card for a lot of people to stop working.

You cannot even play hearts any-more, unless you first get a Microsoft account and download it from there. It requires you to be logged in to some MS store. On top of that it sends a lot of data to MS whatever you do.

There are lots of annoying "bricks" on the start menu, the search still can't find anything. Browser crashes for some "incompability" issues. It was also slower to wake up from sleep, generally the OS was slower to work with as well, which surprised me quite a lot.

In fact I did not see any improvement... could you name one?
 
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GothicGothicness said:
It is possible to revert to previous state? how ??
Click to expand...
Open search (magnifying glass) type "restore" to bring up restore options then go for "go back to windows 7". Or 8.
It's available for a month after the upgrade, if a month already passed, if user used win10 more than that, it's not possible to revert back this way.

The browser, Edge, that replaced IE, is on it's basic state and doesn't allow addins and stuff. It's supposed to be "enahanced" soon. Till then…
Although it's superfast, avoid it and use anything else. I use Firefox.
 
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In terms of its spyware, you know you're in trouble when one of the setup options is:

Let apps use my Advertising ID for experiences across apps
Click to expand...

Why is a ****ing OS giving me an "advertising ID? By the way, you only get asked this if you click on the tiny link to "custiomize setup", otherwise it just assumes the answer is yes.
 
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GothicGothicness said:
It is possible to revert to previous state? how ??



Well, I am sure it is not just his laptop who is having this horror story.. even on a place like Code Project which is very MS friendly you can see all sorts of horror stories. For example there was recent win 10 auto-update which caused the network card for a lot of people to stop working.

You cannot even play hearts any-more, unless you first get a Microsoft account and download it from there. It requires you to be logged in to some MS store. On top of that it sends a lot of data to MS whatever you do.

There are lots of annoying "bricks" on the start menu, the search still can't find anything. Browser crashes for some "incompability" issues. It was also slower to wake up from sleep, generally the OS was slower to work with as well, which surprised me quite a lot.

In fact I did not see any improvement… could you name one?
Click to expand...



I'm sure there's more horror stories than just your friends but I'm equally sure there's many more success stories. This happens with every new OS. I remember people telling me Windows 7 was crap and to stick with win xp. I didn't listen then either and it worked out just fine.

No hearts! Uninstalling now.;)

Improvements? Slightly faster, better search, better file management, dx12. That's off the top of my head but if your really interested there's several articles on the net that will tell you.

Anyway I'm not telling anyone what OS to use, people can educate themselves and choose. Windows 10 though is a fine OS and far from crap IMO and for free I don't see a downside as long as you take the proper precautions that you should when upgrading to any OS. Also after upgrading to get it for free I'd recommend a fresh install although no one in my family has and it's working without issue.
 
Spybot have created an app to remove and block Windows spyware. It's the best and most credible solution I've seen so far. They have also noted that some of this spyware is being introduced to existing Windows 7 & 8 systems too.

https://www.safer-networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon/
 
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Ripper said:
Spybot have created an app to remove and block Windows spyware. It's the best and most credible solution I've seen so far. They have also noted that some of this spyware is being introduced to existing Windows 7 & 8 systems too.

https://www.safer-networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon/
Click to expand...

Ahh. Good to know, thanks.

I'm quite happy with win10, I have it installed on 2 machines (one win7, one win8), and it works very well for me. I had a couple of programs that didn't work initially, but that's solved now. Didn't loose any data or programs, but I didn't select easy upgrade mode, never do.

The start menu is better than that of win 8, but I still prefer to use Stardock's start menu replacer.

I was also happy with windows 7, and I can't say if Win 10 is better or not. If the upgrade wasn't free, I probably would have kept my win 7 installation. But I would have upgraded win8 anyway.

pibbur
 
Ripper said:
Spybot have created an app to remove and block Windows spyware. It's the best and most credible solution I've seen so far. They have also noted that some of this spyware is being introduced to existing Windows 7 & 8 systems too.

https://www.safer-networking.org/spybot-anti-beacon/
Click to expand...

Didn't know for that one, thanks.
I disabled everything I could manually, because I didn't trust other "automatic" solutions.
This one however feels great. Will try it later.
 
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Yeah, they actually said that one of reasons to make it was that lots of people were getting malware from dodgy apps claiming to do the same thing.
 
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I've been messing around with my new Win 10 machine. And I have to say it's nice in some ways, but is buggy. Can't cleanly change the downloads location to my archive drive. Firefox still defaults to my user directory. So now I have 2 downloads directories. :/
 
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Firefox is not windows10.
I'm not sure what exact problem is with windows there.
Humanity has risen! said:
http://www.oo-software.com/en/shutup10

I prefer ShutUp10 to kill all the tracking bullshit. It has the most options I've seen.
Click to expand...
"Most options" is not necessarily the best enduser solution. Sometimes it's even the worst as random users break OS by messing with stuff they know nothing about. It's OS, not a game where you'll mod something, break the game but it won't affect anything else. By breaking just one thing in OS, you may cause problems with other software installed.

The second best solution is always no adware/spyware/scamware automatic next-next-next-no-questionsasked-finish. That's this spybot's util. Still didn't analyze it completely, but if it didn't deal with something, it's always easy to change that something manually.

The overall best would be if Microsoft disabled spying on ordinary users by default and kept the big brother scheme only within their insider program.

But in the end seems that Shutup10 gets frequent updates so it's definetly a promising alternative.
 
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