In summary – surprisingly painless

I’ve been running Windows 7 since it went RTM and was very happy with it. It was reliable, everything just worked, and it wasn’t too much of a resource hog. I completely bypassed Windows 8/8.1 as this is a desktop/gaming PC so a touch interface is of 0 interest to me.

The Upgrade

I prefer to do a clean install of a new OS, and that was my plan in this case. Unfortunately, Microsoft in their infinite wisdom decided that there would be no way to convert your Win7 key to a Windows 10 one directly even though I’m entitled to the “free” upgrade. Given that I’d bought a shiny new SSD to install everything on, this was a little inconvenient.

To be fair to Microsoft, the upgrade was a little slow but no issues encountered. Everything just worked post upgrade. Though since this system had been running for a few years there was a bit of cruft to deal with. At this point I extracted the windows 10 product key, and rolled the change back to Windows 7.

Upgrade customers are entitled to rollback to Windows 7 for a month, so use it if you need it 🙂

The Clean Install

In possession of a valid product key, I then installed the new SSD and installed Windows 10 (64-bit International). Again, very smooth process – definitely the easiest Windows install I’ve ever had to do. No device drivers of any kind required, everything was just automagically identified, and drivers installed while I was still in the process of turning off all the creepy bits.

Minor Issues (and they are very minor)

Cortana requires that you be in the UK. Region set to Ireland (the accents aren’t that different guys!) disables here
Libraries are disabled by default – easy to turn back on, but why disable a great feature
Settings are now spread between two panels – a settings one, and the proper control panel. One management space please.
Start Menu – haven’t used the Start Menu/Programs list since Vista went live. Don’t use it in Windows 10 so no change. Windows key + name of file or program… job done