[SOLVED] Upgrade to 10 from 8.1

[Perrorist]

While I know it's a good idea to do a clean install of 10, the fact is I have so much software installed on 8.1 that it's tempting to upgrade in place. What are the risks if I do that?

 

[SkyNetRising]

Image your OS drive before upgrading.
If something goes wrong, you can restore OS drive from image.
You can use Macrium Reflect for this.

 

[britechguy]

I have never done anything but in-place upgrades on all my own machines that did not start out life as Windows 10 machines, and all worked perfectly.

I would always do an in-place upgrade, anyway, just to get the existing license converted to a Windows 10 license stored on Microsoft's servers. If the system works afterward, and barring an unstable existing installation or one that has underlying corruption, it should you've saved yourself a lot of time and effort.

If the system doesn't work well, then you can do a completely clean reinstall.

But whether one is doing an in-place upgrade or a completely clean reinstall, it is vital to have taken a full system image backup of the current Windows installation as well as a separate user data backup for all users on the machine. Far, far better to have these and not need them than to need them and not have them.

 

[Perrorist]

Thanks. That's reassuring.