Surprisingly smooth upgrade from Windows 8.1 two Windows 10 1803

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FlyingPenguin
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Surprisingly smooth upgrade from Windows 8.1 two Windows 10 1803

Post by FlyingPenguin »

I've been putting it off but I finally decided to upgrade my work station from 8.1 to Windows 10 today. I really had to sooner or later because I upgraded the CPU on this machine and it's no longer supported for updates under Windows 7 or 8.1.

After imaging the drive, I went ahead and did the update to Win 10 1803 (no way I wanted to mess around with 1809), and it all went surprisingly smoothly.

I have to give it to Microsoft. They've really got this upgrade system working very well nowadays. No problem at all. All my printers were still there, no problems with any applications. Just had to update the NVidia driver.
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Re: surprisingly smooth upgrade from Windows 8.1 two Windows 10 1803

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Welcome to the present! :)
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Re: surprisingly smooth upgrade from Windows 8.1 two Windows 10 1803

Post by Losbot »

Damn it. My gaming rig is still on 1709. I need to update to 1803 already. Did you use the copy you recommended to me before?
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Re: surprisingly smooth upgrade from Windows 8.1 two Windows 10 1803

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Yes. I have that image on a USB drive, which just makes it easier.

I was impressed I didn't have to install any printer drivers or scanner drivers. Not even the fingerprint reader driver. I didn't install any drivers at all except the latest NVidia driver. Windows had installed an older NVidia driver.

I have some old and funky software that I half expected to have an issue with. I know it all runs okay under Win10 because I've been running it on my laptop, but I was concerned that the upgrade might break something, but it's all good.

Yeah, I had to re-do all my major file associations and default apps for file types (media, photos, PDFs, etc), and install the latest Open Shell, but it all came right up nicely.

Only funky thing was the finger prints. It still had my prints and took them, but it wouldn't let me use a fingerprint in lieu of a password for the Admin password in the UAC popup, until I had setup a pin number. Dunno why I need a pin number if I have a password and a fingerprint. Might try to remove it now and see if it works.
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Re: surprisingly smooth upgrade from Windows 8.1 two Windows 10 1803

Post by Losbot »

Not bad. I got everything ready and just double clicked the iso file and then on setup.exe.
Windows 10 upgraded from ver 1709 to ver 1803 without any issues. Everything was exactly how I left it and working properly.
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Re: surprisingly smooth upgrade from Windows 8.1 two Windows 10 1803

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Gotta say, Win10 sure handles multiple cores & hyperthreading better. than Win7/8.1 I can run a VM while transcoding videos and not bring the PC to a crawl.

Only glitch I ran into was that a couple of times after a reboot, while I was setting thing up, explorer.exe would hang (couldn't even bring up Task Manager), requiring a reset and it would boot fine afterwards. I think I nailed it down to some flaky background app and I have a lot of them running (screen capture, Allway Sync, Logitech Gaming Software, File Eraser, DisplayFusion, JungleDisk, VMWare Player, etc).

I tend not to upgrade software if I don't have to, so some of them were old and may have had Win10 compatibility issues. I upgraded them all, and uninstalled an old Epson printer fax background application I no longer needed.

Seems to be behaving now. If it happens again, I'll start installing driver updates from the mobo manufacturer. In general I find that Win10 does a good job of installing mobo drivers, so I don't bother with that unless I have to.

One funky thing is that Defender notification icon has a red "X" on it indicating an issue, but if you open Defender, everything is fine. Seems to be a known issue. There's a couple of fixes listed but not worrying about it now. Heck, I'm used to Win 8.1 which didn't even have a Defender icon. Might just turn it off. Win10's notifications tab will notify me anyway, and I make a habit of opening Defender once in a while to check it anyway.

I'm up to date on all Windows Updates through February (I have the 30 day deferral enabled for security updates, so March hasn't installed yet).
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Re: surprisingly smooth upgrade from Windows 8.1 two Windows 10 1803

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FlyingPenguin wrote:JungleDisk
Dam, haven't heard that name in a while! I was an early adopter of their software and used it all over! Felt it went downhill after Rackspace bought them. At the time when I started looking, ran into crazy performance issues, taking forever to back up some file servers. Ended up switching over to Cloudberry.
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Re: surprisingly smooth upgrade from Windows 8.1 two Windows 10 1803

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FlyingPenguin wrote:Yes. I have that image on a USB drive, which just makes it easier.

I was impressed I didn't have to install any printer drivers or scanner drivers. Not even the fingerprint reader driver. I didn't install any drivers at all except the latest NVidia driver. Windows had installed an older NVidia driver.

I have some old and funky software that I half expected to have an issue with. I know it all runs okay under Win10 because I've been running it on my laptop, but I was concerned that the upgrade might break something, but it's all good.

Yeah, I had to re-do all my major file associations and default apps for file types (media, photos, PDFs, etc), and install the latest Open Shell, but it all came right up nicely.

Only funky thing was the finger prints. It still had my prints and took them, but it wouldn't let me use a fingerprint in lieu of a password for the Admin password in the UAC popup, until I had setup a pin number. Dunno why I need a pin number if I have a password and a fingerprint. Might try to remove it now and see if it works.
Everyone should take note and remember that when they bitch about how some things work or break. People just don't realize how much MS bends over backwards so their OS is extremely backwards compatible. They don't just say, your software is outdated, find something else and move on. Sure, out of the millions of software applications/drivers out there, there's bound to be something that doesn't work, but generally a large majority do work. Depending on the partner, Microsoft has been known to put in very specific code to allow some software to continue to work. I have a Brother Printer, a Canon flatbed scanner and a Verifi thumbprint reader that all has been working since Windows 7. I even had a separate volume knob (by Griffen) that continued work. I've since gotten rid of it since my keyboard has a built in knob.
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Re: surprisingly smooth upgrade from Windows 8.1 two Windows 10 1803

Post by FlyingPenguin »

JungleDisk
Yeah, I have an old lifetime license for the workstation desktop version, so I pay them nothing, and just pay Amazon S3 for my bucket which has a few terrabytes on it now and charge me around 4 bucks a month for.

Never had a problem. Running it on my server, workstation and wife's laptop. Just for backup, no sync, to back stop my on site backups.

If I ever have a problem with it, I may switch to a free open source backup Steve Gibson mentioned once that connects directly to your Amazon S3 bucket.
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Re: Surprisingly smooth upgrade from Windows 8.1 two Windows 10 1803

Post by FlyingPenguin »

Well, except for the Media Center PCs on my TVs (which are dedicated just for Media Center), every PC in my house is now officially running Win 10.
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Re: surprisingly smooth upgrade from Windows 8.1 two Windows 10 1803

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FlyingPenguin wrote:
JungleDisk
Yeah, I have an old lifetime license for the workstation desktop version, so I pay them nothing, and just pay Amazon S3 for my bucket which has a few terrabytes on it now and charge me around 4 bucks a month for.

Never had a problem. Running it on my server, workstation and wife's laptop. Just for backup, no sync, to back stop my on site backups.

If I ever have a problem with it, I may switch to a free open source backup Steve Gibson mentioned once that connects directly to your Amazon S3 bucket.
If you do, take a look at Cloudberry. No monthly fee, just initial purchase price, but there is a small yearly fee if you want to continue getting updates/support. It works with multiple cloud storage providers, so same software, but you're free to choose who you use for storage (S3, Azure, Google, etc...) Performs really well. They also have a cloud managed version if you're managing backups as a reseller.
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Re: Surprisingly smooth upgrade from Windows 8.1 two Windows 10 1803

Post by Executioner »

Where can you get 1803? Maybe you can put a copy in your shares?
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Re: Surprisingly smooth upgrade from Windows 8.1 two Windows 10 1803

Post by FlyingPenguin »

It's been in my shares since December, in the OS folder: Win10_1803_English_x64.iso

I like archiving old ISOs because Microsoft makes it very hard to download an older one once they release a new version.
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