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What's My Prognosis with Windows 7?


razor7music

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2 hours ago, Larry Jones said:

Include this article and this one in your research.

Both articles are fairly compelling. Sounds like if I do an adequate backup of my files and projects, uninstall my AV software until after the upgrade, and detach my external storage until after the upgrade, I can always do a restore of W7 if something goes wrong. (I'm going to detach my iLOK USB dongle until after the upgrade too--just in case!)

I did read on another post that the individual that has the same audio interface as me uninstalled the drivers for it until after the W10 upgrade, and then installed them again. I'm going to do that too. I had a real pain upgrading from XP to 7 because of drivers--so I know how they can cause issues.

Edited by razor7music
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8 minutes ago, razor7music said:

Sounds like if I do an adequate backup of my files and projects, uninstall my AV software until after the upgrade, and detach my external storage until after the upgrade, I can always do a restore of W7 if something goes wrong.

No. If you're talking about the free Win10 upgrade utility, that won't be possible afaik. This free Win10 utility essentially takes from you your Win7 serial and in exchange gives you back, legitimately, a Win10 serial/installation, so you exchange one for the other; you won't be left with both. 

Unless of course by "something goes wrong" you're referring to not being able to successfully complete the Win10 upgrade then yeah you can fall back onto the Win7 installation provided you arranged a proper backup. 

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7 minutes ago, Kevin Perry said:

Macrium Reflect is your friend here: image before you do anything so you can go back to square one at any time.  And it's free!

I have a system restore disc for W7 and will do a file backup to an external drive just before the upgrade. I should be OK. I already make copies of my Cakewalk projects on an external drive.

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4 minutes ago, Christian Jones said:

No. If you're talking about the free Win10 upgrade utility, that won't be possible afaik. This free Win10 utility essentially takes from you your Win7 serial and in exchange gives you back, legitimately, a Win10 serial/installation, so you exchange one for the other; you won't be left with both. 

Unless of course by "something goes wrong" you're referring to not being able to successfully complete the Win10 upgrade then yeah you can fall back onto the Win7 installation provided you arranged a proper backup. 

Great. That's what I've seen on other PC's I've upgraded to W10. If there's a hiccup, the install wizard reverts you back to where you were. I just want cover all the bases--especially since I'm in the middle of a track I'm almost done with. Thinking of waiting until after that one's done--but I don't want to have "paralysis from analysis"  by over-thinking the whole thing. 😕

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40 minutes ago, razor7music said:

Great. That's what I've seen on other PC's I've upgraded to W10. If there's a hiccup, the install wizard reverts you back to where you were.

Actually, if something does go wrong it's possible that I could go really wrong where that upgrade wizard won't simply revert you back to where you started w/ your Win7 installation but instead can, possibly, seriously f everything up to where your Win7 system image will be your only way back. IIRC, Mcleod (now a mod here), had two machines that he attempted to upgrade to Win10 from Win7 via this utility and one machine upgraded w/o a hitch and the other.. I believe he said it wrecked his system and the image backup was the only way to restore it. If you read Tezza's thread up there you'll see my thread linked to in there from 6mo prior when I was going through this Win10 upgrade and Mcleod talks about what happened w/ his machines in my thread. @abacabalso has detailed walkthrough posts in there and it's safe to follow abacab's advice on this stuff w/o asking further. Basically, most people are able to do the free Win10 upgrade w/ this utility w/ zero problems, and a very precious few get their whole system f'd up and have to do an image restore. Actually, Mcleod is the only one I've heard say it didn't go well for one of his machines. 

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“This free Win10 utility essentially takes from you your Win7 serial and in exchange gives you back, legitimately, a Win10 serial/installation, so you exchange one for the other; you won't be left with both”

You sure about that? I’ll have to test that. I cloned my W7 drive, pulled the original and set it aside. I then ran the utility on the cloned drive for an “in place” W10 upgrade. Swapping drives is no big deal...

course I’m on the road, so it’ll be a while till I can report back. 

t

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2 minutes ago, DeeringAmps said:

“This free Win10 utility essentially takes from you your Win7 serial and in exchange gives you back, legitimately, a Win10 serial/installation, so you exchange one for the other; you won't be left with both”

You sure about that? I’ll have to test that. I cloned my W7 drive, pulled the original and set it aside. I then ran the utility on the cloned drive for an “in place” W10 upgrade. Swapping drives is no big deal...

course I’m on the road, so it’ll be a while till I can report back. 

t

Perhaps your Win7 installation will still run on that original drive as it currently is but the serial number will have been chewed up by MS so you wouldn't ever be able to reinstall/re-register it or download any leftover Win7 updates you haven't downloaded yet. Afaik anyway. 

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As Christian stated above, it is legit. Done it many times, and am doing it for many of our customers as we speak. Your win7 license will be converted to a 10 digital license, even if an oem copy. Once done, you can even swap in a new ssd to orig mobo and perform a fresh install, and it will activate.  This method was offered and promoted with a deadline, but they never shut down the process. 

Grant 

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1 hour ago, DeeringAmps said:

“This free Win10 utility essentially takes from you your Win7 serial and in exchange gives you back, legitimately, a Win10 serial/installation, so you exchange one for the other; you won't be left with both”

You sure about that? I’ll have to test that. I cloned my W7 drive, pulled the original and set it aside. I then ran the utility on the cloned drive for an “in place” W10 upgrade. Swapping drives is no big deal...

course I’m on the road, so it’ll be a while till I can report back. 

t

There's _always_ a chance something will go wrong when you upgrade an OS to an entirely new version, no matter where the upgrade source comes from. I had a pain on one machine and smooth sailing on the other, both during the free upgrade offer period. So many variables, so many lines of code - it happens.

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I got a message when I went to update to the recent version of Cakewalk Today, that Windows 7 is no longer supported.  I tried Win10 on this computer 3 years ago and within a year I had bad crashes with it twice so I put 7 back on it.  Will Cake    still work if I download the next update?  I'm happy with 7 all my programs work and it never crashes unlike Win 10 did!!!

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6 hours ago, Leighton Cooper said:

Will Cake    still work if I download the next update?

Always in motion is the future.

If you had asked in late October 2017 about the next update of SONAR, you would have gotten all sorts of answers, probably none of which would have been "there will be no 'next' update of SONAR."

On your computer you say Windows 10 itself worked correctly for a while then stopped working correctly, so who knows?

People stay on Windows 7 to try to save money (and upgrade hassle) by holding on to their old computer for as long as possible before upgrading it or buying a new one.

As time passes, the hassle level will continue to rise until it reaches a point at which it is more hassle to stay with Windows 7 than it would be to upgrade their system to Windows 10. The hassle comes first in the form of looming uncertainty about compatibility, later it will be in the form of incompatibility itself.

How long a person wishes to hold out probably depends on their comfort level with the uncertainty until of course the wall is hit and the hardware breaks down or the software just plain won't run any more, and holding on to the old system is a false economy. Until that time: nothing is guaranteed.

"Supported" means that the tech support staff and developers (including QA) will do what they can (within reason) to see to it that Cakewalk will run on any Windows 10 system that meets the spec. Also in the case of the developers, that they stay on top of the latest improvements to the way the OS deals with multimedia and use that information to make the program work better. With a supported platform you can breathe more easily.

I was a Windows 7 user until last year when a Cakewalk developer said in this forum that they were no longer actively developing for that platform. I couldn't switch over fast enough once I heard that. I'm not going to be standing on the ice floe drifting away wondering why my computer programs are starting to act weird and I can't download any new ones because they need the current OS.

Windows 10 didn't work as well as my very optimized Windows 7 system at first, but I spent some time and figured out why, and now I have a very optimized Windows 10 system where I can shut off realtime malware scans permanently, delay system updates for weeks at a time if I want, etc. because I learned how to control it.

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11 hours ago, razor7music said:

I had a pain on one machine and smooth sailing on the other, both during the free upgrade offer period

Yep, tried the in place on my x86 office machine back during the "official" free upgrade, almost endless churning of the hourglass; hardware issues, no dice!
It is still happily running Win7x86 Pro...

t

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16 hours ago, razor7music said:

Both articles are fairly compelling. Sounds like if I do an adequate backup of my files and projects, uninstall my AV software until after the upgrade, and detach my external storage until after the upgrade, I can always do a restore of W7 if something goes wrong. (I'm going to detach my iLOK USB dongle until after the upgrade too--just in case!)

I did read on another post that the individual that has the same audio interface as me uninstalled the drivers for it until after the W10 upgrade, and then installed them again. I'm going to do that too. I had a real pain upgrading from XP to 7 because of drivers--so I know how they can cause issues.

This is what I did, I removed all win 7 drivers, graphics etc and also disconnected all peripherals, also all software that was not win 10 compatible (I didn't have much). Then I just reinstalled stuff with Win 10 drivers after the upgrade. I remember reading about it somewhere, the installer might fail if it found incompatible hardware or software. To be honest, I do not know why anyone wouldn't do this, I took the view that Win 10 is a completely different OS to Win 7 and nothing will be compatible.

I see posts everywhere where people are trying to run Win 7 drivers for something under Win 10 "it might work or not". I would never bother to do this or even try it. If you don't have the hardware and software to support Win 10, then I would say don't upgrade until you do. My USB 3.0 ports never worked that well under Win 7, I also put their third party drivers on, no difference. I took all those drivers off before upgrading, after installing Win 10, the USB ports work flawlessly without the need for any third party drivers. My Steinberg UR44 interface hated the USB 3.0 ports, I bet I could run it on them now.

Edited by Tezza
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12 hours ago, Leighton Cooper said:

I got a message when I went to update to the recent version of Cakewalk Today, that Windows 7 is no longer supported.  I tried Win10 on this computer 3 years ago and within a year I had bad crashes with it twice so I put 7 back on it.  Will Cake    still work if I download the next update?  I'm happy with 7 all my programs work and it never crashes unlike Win 10 did!!!

Jonathan Sasor answered that question earlier in this thread.

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23 hours ago, razor7music said:

I see. So you "pay" either way? Either you purchase the upgrade or they spam you to death! :D

I doubt that the purchased version will be spam free until you either disable or remove all of the "extras".  ;)

It's the same build of Windows 10 either way.

One advantage to purchasing a full retail version license (not OEM) is that you can move easily the license to a new machine that you build. OEM licenses are supposed to remain locked to the original computer they were installed on. Though not a big deal if you plan to buy your next computer someday with Win 10 pre-installed (although there are probably a few "loopholes" in the OEM license,  I am only intending to state the official MS position on the issue).

 

Edited by abacab
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38 minutes ago, oneofmany said:

Actually, if you use a Microsoft account, you can tie the license to your account, and reuse it on a subsequent build, however only one system can remain activated. 

Grant 

Have you actually done this with an OEM license? You are only supposed to be able to re-activate an OEM  digital license (MS account) on the same machine.

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-windows_install/microsoft-os-retail-vs-oem/3b074bf1-58e3-4675-8706-b9206d5a97a1

Quote

Full version (Retail):

- Includes transfer rights to another computer.

- Doesn't require a previous qualifying version of Windows.

- Expensive

OEM :

OEM versions of Windows are identical to Full License Retail versions except for the following:

- OEM versions do not offer any free Microsoft direct support from Microsoft support personnel

- OEM licenses are tied to the very first computer you install and activate it on

- OEM versions allow all hardware upgrades except for an upgrade to a different model motherboard

- OEM versions cannot be used to directly upgrade from an older Windows operating system

Edited by abacab
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How to tell if your Windows 10 license type is OEM, Retail, or Volume

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-determine-if-license-oem-retail-volume-windows-10

To find out whether your Windows 10 license is OEM, Retail, or Volume, use these steps:

Open Start.

Search for Command Prompt, right-click the top result, and select the Run as administrator option.

Type the following command to determine the license type and press Enter:

slmgr /dli

 

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I understand the readings, however I have done it when replacing cpu/mobo/ram, then subsequently upgrading ssd. Customers have informed me they have done it all in one shot. 

Ymmv of course., but restrictions seem to be really loose with 10. Then again, we used to replace all the guts with Win7 and if need be, a call to reactivate never was an issue. 

Grant 

 

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