If you haven’t signed up, wait. If you have, then I recommend using Clonezilla this weekend to snapshot your hard drive. MSFT has assured us that all machines running Win7 or Win8/8.1 will support Win10. I guess we’ll see.
Clonezilla is a Linux based boot disk (CD/USB) that will ‘ghost’ your drive sector by sector. It writes a recoverable image to an external USB drive. If you speak the language, it’s basically dd > tar > gz, although it offers a variety of options.
I plan on running it tonight on my Win7 machine that will be upgraded to Win10 on the 29th.
It’s a very easy program to use, just _read_ all of the dialog screens. There’s only two things you really need to be absolutely sure of:
Which is the device you’re writing to, and
Which is the device you’re reading from.
You really don’t want to get those mixed up.
On average, over USB 2.0, it’ll take about 1 hour per 100G of data depending on the data. It compresses and packs the data in (default) 2GB files. It’s a sector copy so you can’t use it to retrieve specific files, it will recover all of the drive, all of a partition, or nothing.
I use it on every machine that comes into my shop, before I start working on it. If I screw up and make a machine unusable, I need to be able to return the machine back to the state in which I received it. I’ve recovered from the clonezilla images exactly twice, once on WinXP and once on Win7. Both recoveries performed as expected.
Instructions are on the site on how to burn the ISO’s to a CDROM or to extract the Zip file to a USB thumb device, so all you really need is a suitably sized external USB hard drive.
its crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide. it doesn’t take a long to read as the double talk you put up
Been running Win 10 as part of the Preview program, since they began, on a separate partition of my back up computer.
Build 10240, allegedly RTM, has been the most stable thus far. There are still some driver issues to be ironed out, in particular NVidia and AMD graphics drivers still need some work. As well drivers for my HP wifi printer.
Drivers for the Intel chipset seem solid, as do drivers for the Realtek audio chip, Broadcom wifi, Realtek & Intel LAN appear to be well developed.
Intel’s RAID driver, MEI, and SMBus are solid performers.
The Edge browser is definitely quite a snappy performer, with the last bug updates.
Installation and update procedures have been smooth and glitch free successively on build 10162, 10166 & 10240; save the graphic drivers issue which may be resolved by launch. At least I am still haranguing them with reports…
Cortana installs smoothly and functions well. The Start bar is back and tries to draw out the best balance of win7 & 8.1.
Some of the major annoyances of the win 8 debacle are receding in the rear view mirror.
As I type this from win 10’s Edge browser, I’d say they are getting close to fit and finish.
Cheers
Hans Rupprecht, Commander in Chief
1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group ‘True North’
I wouldn’t recommend CloneZilla for anyone who isn’t already well versed in Unix-isms. That and the tendency for annoying regression bugs to creep in.
Macrium Reflect Free does the same thing, is Windows-centric, and is free for personal, non-commercial use.
Lance, could you repeat that, in English?
Let me see if I can paraphrase.
If you own a Windows 7 or Windows 8 computer, you are entitled to a free upgrade to Windows 10, which will be released some time after July 29th. For existing Windows 7 or 8 laptops, Microsoft will be delivering Windows 10 through Windows Update – that’s the thing that pops up in the lower right corner of your screen periodically and tells you that new updates are available.
Instead of just patching your Windows computer or giving you a new version of Internet Explorer, though, this time it’s going to give you a whole new version of Windows by installing Windows 10 over top of your existing install of Windows 7 or Windows 8
Sounds good, right? Hey, free upgrade. Well, not so fast.
The very first release of any new Windows is always a little buggy. It takes Microsoft a year or so of a new Windows being out there in the world to really get everything right. So if your new Windows 10 doesn’t play well with some software you’ve already got installed, you might be replacing a working Windows 7/8 computer with a not-so-working Windows 10 one. And – here’s the important part – you can’t go backwards if it doesn’t work out. There’ no way to go back to Windows 7 or 8 once you’ve done an upgrade like this, not without wiping your drive, finding the install CDs you got from your computer manufacturer (because of course you remember where those are, right?) and installing Windows and all your software all over again from scratch.
What lance is recommending, then, is that you use a special kind of backup software that doesn’t just back up your files, your baby photos, your MP3s, and all that stuff: it actually takes a perfect, complete copy of your machine, right down to the bits and bytes, and stores that somewhere – a USB-attached eternal drive, usually, or perhaps a NAS if you happen to have one of those in your home. It takes a long time and takes up a lot of space, but if you do this, and Windows 10 turns out not to be to your liking, then you can reverse the backup process and return your computer to its Windows 7/8 state in a couple of hours.
I would not recommend CloneZilla for this, myself, because if you don’t understand what lance has written here you’re not likely to make heads or tails of CloneZilla. Use a product like Macrium Reflect Free instead – it’s a Windows-based product, free download, easy to use, and it will walk you through the process of setting up a USB key or burned CD you can use to boot from and do the backups and restore.
Or you can uninstall (and hide) KB3035583, which is what stuck that upgrade spyware in your system tray.
PS: Acronis TrueImage 2015 does a fine job of cloning disks and partitions.
Not a shareholder, either.
“The very first release of any new Windows is always a little buggy.” Wot a comedian…:) EVERY version of Windows is buggy – they can’t write any other kind. After my windows 8 nightmare, I’ll wait for windows 15 or 20, or buy a mac. I don’t need more crappy tablet software that can’t, won’t or doesn’t know how, to talk to my LAN. I don’t have that many good years left.