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Vista Party @ erco's: Installing Update 1 of 97 — Parallax Forums

Vista Party @ erco's: Installing Update 1 of 97

ercoerco Posts: 20,256
edited 2015-12-30 04:47 in General Discussion
I'm doing the "free" Win10 upgrade (from Win8) to a 2007 Compaq desktop (came with XP) but it ain't really free, I'm paying dearly with hours of time. Win8 crashed with the dreaded endless repair loop. So I'm starting all over with a brand new 1TB HD. Had to start with the original XP restore disks, which took a while. But XP wouldn't upgrade direct to 8, so I used the Vista upgrade, which won't let me download Win8 until after Vista downloads & installs 97 updates (possibly more, currently on update #73!). Then Lord knows how much longer to install Win 8, then Win 10. Quite the party! At least it's a low-priority background task I just look in on occasionally. It's a hoot seeing the original low-res start screens on XP & Vista. A blast from the past.

This process reminded me that I have an extra HD with Win8 on it. I paid the $35 upgrade fee to put Win8 on my wife's computer, which she promptly rejected, so she went back to Win7. Eventually she'll have to go straight to Win10, so I can use her Win8 product key on another computer to ultimately get a free Win10 upgrade. I wonder if my little old Acer Aspire netbook (also XP) is a worthy candidate. I've seen that those can run Win10.

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/71296/20150723/this-old-acer-aspire-one-can-handle-windows-10-video.htm

Oops, gotta go, the desktop is restarting again. How exciting!

Edit: At least 16 +7 more Vista updates required, plus it looks like from Vista I can only go to Win8, then another time-consuming step to go to Win8.1, which is required for this not-so-free upgrade to Win10.

Comments

  • Unfortunately, installing Win10 as an upgrade requires an existing install of 7 SP1 or 8.1, it won't upgrade from 8. And getting from Vista to either requires Vista SP1 or higher.

    I had to go through a similar process recently, before Win10 was announced. I have Vista upgrade disks so did the trick of installing without a key, then re-installing Vista using the upgrade key. From there used a Win8 upgrade key I purchased to get there, then did the 8.1 upgrade, and finally went to Win10 in the insider program. This is a home-built tower system running an Asus P5K-VM motherboard, released around 2006-7.

    I've also two HP DV6609WM laptops from early Vista era. They are Athlon 64 X2 and run Win10 as well as they did Vista. Only real issues with them are HP doesn't offer any drivers for anything newer than Vista and sometimes they don't want to wake from sleep. The former was taken care of by installing Vista era drivers for things Win10 didn't support out of the box or on Windows Update, and the latter is an issue I'm still finagling with but have worked around by either setting them to not sleep or to go to hibernate.

    Well, I wish you good luck.
  • ercoerco Posts: 20,256
    I already had 8.1 (upgraded from 8, upgraded from Vista, upgraded from XP) on this box and it qualified for the Win10 upgrade. I better not be doing all this for nothing!
  • 'Sounds like fun, erco! 'Hope you've got plenty of beer on hand!

    -Phil
  • ercoerco Posts: 20,256
    edited 2015-12-30 07:17
    121 Vista updates, a dozen restarts and I'm not even to Service Pack 1 yet...

    Need. More. Beer.
  • Sounds like me this Christmas ..... "Santa" brought us 4 new laptop computers for everybody.... It's tough enough installing and getting one computer the way that you want it, but try it with four of them all at the same time.

    Something I cant stress enough and one of the main reasons I run everything in a shell ....
    McAfee isn't quite enough, you need to cross correlate your efforts with "SpyBot Search and destroy"

    On another note: Erco, how close were you to that earthquake? .... We had a 4.3 this morning in Oklahoma that shook the house pretty good about 2 miles from the epicenter and knocked our power out for about 3 hours
  • ercoerco Posts: 20,256
    Erco, how close were you to that earthquake? ....

    Didn't feel anything except love & joy for Microsoft today, thanks... :)

  • Buck RogersBuck Rogers Posts: 2,185
    edited 2015-12-30 15:15
    erco wrote: »
    Erco, how close were you to that earthquake? ....

    Didn't feel anything except love & joy for Microsoft today, thanks... :)


    However.... Dell tells me that this laptop is not capable of running Windows 10. It will run Windows 8.1 with disinterest. But not Windows 10.

  • ercoerco Posts: 20,256
    erco's robot, among other things, says to run the upgrade advisor.
  • I'm not willing to even upgrade to Windows 7 because I'd lose Windows Mail. I have my quirks.
  • ercoerco Posts: 20,256
    120+ updates in, I've hit a snag installing Vista SP1. Trying the brute force method instead of automatic update.

    http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_vista-update/windows-vista-service-pack-1-wont-install/007a87a0-0d5a-4aad-880a-c7f343b50205
  • Erco, you have my pity. I have been avoiding Windows 10 just because all my systems are working cleanly (knocking on wood as I type). I recently bought my wife a new laptop and went with a business class desktop replacement model to get all the features I wanted. However, I yanked out the 256GB SSD that it came with and loaded in a 1TB Hybrid drive. Reloading Windows 7 Professional on the new drive was ridiculously easy, to the point I figured something wasn't right. The only issue was some blue screening during occasional cold boots which I finally found out to be a services permission discrepancy. Once that was fixed, it's been running fantastic.

    On the flip side, I have spent a few hours this week debugging a Windows 98 machine on a piece of equipment. It's looking to be a motherboard or flaky power supply issue, so the machine is probably going to end up as scrap very soon (it's custom hardware so a newer motherboard or OS won't work)
  • However.... Dell tells me that this laptop is not capable of running Windows 10. It will run Windows 8.1 with disinterest. But not Windows 10.
    All Dell is really telling is that they won't support Win10. HP did similar with my laptops. Initially, they published my laptop type would have Win7 support but rescinded that just before Win7 went RTM. However, it ran 7 just fine with Vista drivers.

    System requirements for Win10 are mostly identical to Win8/8.1... and actually a little relaxed compared to 7.
    OS: Windows 7 SP1 or Windows 8.1 Update.
    Processor: 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster processor or SoC
    RAM: 1 gigabyte (GB) for 32-bit or 2 GB for 64-bit
    Hard disk space: 16 GB for 32-bit OS 20 GB for 64-bit OS
    Graphics card: DirectX 9 or later with WDDM 1.0 driver
    Display: 800x600 or higher
  • ercoerco Posts: 20,256
    SP1 is in like Flynn.

    Downloading SP2 now. It's fun, I keep telling myself.
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    edited 2015-12-30 20:55
    WBA,
    I have been avoiding Windows 10 just because all my systems are working cleanly...

    That is good. But I thought people were avoiding Win 10 because it's a big spy bot trojan indistinguishable from malware:

    http://bgr.com/2015/07/31/windows-10-upgrade-spying-how-to-opt-out/

    Perhaps I have to get one and see for myself.
  • I have Win10 installed on several computers and laptops and really like it. Typing this on a Surface 4 that Santa dropped off on my front porch.
    .
    I really don't understand everyone's resistance to upgrading. I upgraded a 6 year old Dell from 8.1 and it runs just as well as it did before.
    .
  • ercoerco Posts: 20,256
    All my troubles were caused by Win 8.1's "automatic repair loop" which crashed my HD. None of Microsoft's "repairs" worked and I have wasted countless hours on it. If only I could bill them for those hours...
  • Heater: I have had the following mantra with Microsoft software for many years: "If it works, leave it alone." A laptop that I had years ago with Windows 2000 outlasted many XP laptops I had. I am very satisfied with how Windows 7 Ultmate and Windows 7 Professional runs with my tweaks, so I have no plans to update any of my Win7 systems to Win10 (I have 4 in my house).

    FireNWater: I don't really have anything specifically against Windows 10, just that I have no issues with all of my systems, so the last thing I want is to create one from a "free upgrade". I have a lot of hardware that spans a decent amount of years, so I still need some legacy style support.
  • ercoerco Posts: 20,256
    This is ridiculous, every step is a struggle. Vista SP2 is in but Win 8 still won't download. Says bad connection. I'm not the first...

    http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_8-windows_install/windows-8-upgrade-we-cant-connect-right-now-please/dc570767-5e8a-4fda-b1f0-dbb2cc46bf0e?auth=1

    Silly me, I thought only vintage ham gear could be called boat anchors! http://www.dxzone.com/dx2836/boatanchor-manual-archive-bama.html
  • Heater: I have had the following mantra with Microsoft software for many years: "If it works, leave it alone." . . .[snip]. . .
    .
    Roger that . . . I have a CNC machine running XP that works "just so" that won't be getting upgraded. I'll probably take it "off the grid" and use USB's to transfer the G-Code.
    .

  • I haven't used W10 yet, however disinterest has only increased as time and MS's bumbling goes on.

    Work gave me a laptop with the option of going with W8.1 which I unfortunately took.
    Even with Classic Shell, its still a bit of a PITA, and I prefer still W7 Ult with SSD I use in the CD expansion slot.

    Aside from Cortana's Blade Runner-esque UI, or future DX12 gaming, I haven't heard of anything mind blowing worth the effort, aggravation, loss of privacy potential, etc, etc.

  • I tried to upgrade a vista laptop to win7 got through the entire install only to get a message at the end that said hardware not compatable. I finally installed Linix and at the end it told me there was a driver issue with the Broadcom wifi chip that is on the motherboard. It would have been nice to have gotten that with MS early on.
    Jim
  • ercoerco Posts: 20,256
    I got tired of the "Sorry, can't connect" message today and called Microsoft support. Connected to India, natch, but I got thru pretty quick. The tech seemed capable and took remote control of my computer to download an ISO of Win8 from http://getintopc.com/softwares/operating-systems/download-windows-8-pro-iso/ so I'm bookmarking that site, although I hope I never need to sit thru another 2.5GB download just to get Win8 long enough to get to Win 8.1 to get to Win10...
  • ercoerco Posts: 20,256
    Yay, things are looking up! The Win8 ISO installed just fine (my first ISO!) using my product key and just seconds after Win 8 loaded for the first time, I got the Win10 upgrade offer, which is currently downloading. Based on what I had read, I expected to have to do another time-consuming step to upgrade to 8.1, but mayhaps that's not necessary after all. Fingers crossed that Microsoft's Win10 and Cortana may be spying on me before midnight!
  • ercoerco Posts: 20,256
    Mods, I'm not sure why you're sinking this. This is not an anti-Microsoft rant, just documentation of the process with a potentially happy ending.
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    You mean if I post here now expressing interest in what might be the outcome the thread does not show up on top as usual?
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    Ah, you are right.

    Seems the mods don't care about the forum members anymore.
  • ercoerco Posts: 20,256
    What a pity. My hopes to make heater into a Windows convert were sunk along with this thread. Ah, what might have been.
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