Question How do I safely upgrade my computer?

[Yuba4D]

my current specs are :
intel core i5 6600k,
gtx 1070,
z170-A
and my memory is 32GB of corsair vengeance
and I'm upgrading my CPU to a Ryzen 5 5600x and my motherboard to a b550M-A WIFI II

people online mainly seem to be saying that I will need to completely wipe my SSD so I was wondering both how to do that and also if I can use my win 10 pro after I have wiped my SSD

 

[Lafong]

my current specs are :
intel core i5 6600k,
gtx 1070,
z170-A
and my memory is 32GB of corsair vengeance
and I'm upgrading my CPU to a Ryzen 5 5600x and my motherboard to a b550M-A WIFI II

people online mainly seem to be saying that I will need to completely wipe my SSD so I was wondering both how to do that and also if I can use my win 10 pro after I have wiped my SSD

You might be able to re-use your existing Win 10 Pro. How did you acquire it......on a pre-built PC? Bought it an Amazon? How exactly.

You would not have to manually wipe your SSD. You would instead delete ALL partitions that are on it during your new Windows 10 installation attempt. You'll be shown all of the partitions and you'd delete them all. Then and there.

That would leave you with 100 percent "unallocated space". Windows installation will make new partitions as necessary.

 

[USAFRet]

How To - Windows 10 clean install tutorial

If you are looking for the Windows 11 Clean install tutorial, you can find that here: Windows 11 Clean install tutorial (Click here) Otherwise, welcome to the Windows 10 Clean install tutorial This tutorial is intended to help you, step by step, to perform a clean install of Windows...

forums.tomshardware.com

 

[Yuba4D]

You might be able to re-use your existing Win 10 Pro. How did you acquire it......on a pre-built PC? Bought it an Amazon? How exactly.

You would not have to manually wipe your SSD. You would instead delete ALL partitions that are on it during your new Windows 10 installation attempt. You'll be shown all of the partitions and you'd delete them all. Then and there.

That would leave you with 100 percent "unallocated space". Windows installation will make new partitions as necessary.

I found a key in my emails that might be the correct one, got it from my dads friend and he said it was win 10 pro which is what I currently have installed on my computer so I hope that's the correct one, and I made a boot drive and I have started to backup some files onto a 500GB drive. Are there any directories that I should back up (especially game saves). I have already backed up the appdata, documents (OneDrive and personal), downloads (only specific things) and the folders on my desktop. I'm not sure what partitions are, and if I had to wipe the SSD I was planning on using a win 11 boot drive I made, but if I could leave windows installed and just delete everything else instead then I could just use the upgrade feature instead which would also mean that I wouldn't have to worry about losing my copy of windows. I'm pretty sure that it was either an official Microsoft key or the one from my dad's friend. The computer is not prebuilt and the motherboard, CPU and 16GB of RAM was from my dad's friend (same one with the win 10 pro key) and I bought the GPU, SSD, and another 16GB of RAM