Friday, July 31, 2015

Windows 10: The Basics

Okay, we can get started two ways, you can wait for Microsoft to do the automated in place upgrade or you can download your own installation media (ISO) and run the installer manually and do the in place upgrade.

Here is the link to the media tool creator:
Windows 10 Media Creation Tool

ONCE YOUR CURRENT INSTALL OF WINDOWS SAYS GENUINE AND ACTIVATED (regardless of how it became that way), YOU SHOULD GET A LICENSED COPY OF WINDOWS 10. YMMV!

Download and run and you can download a DVD image of the installer (what i recommend)
Then copy the contents of that to a blank USB flashdrive formatted in fat32 and set as a boot partition.

Then double click the .exe file and follow along.

Once Windows 10 is installed, you can reinstall it from the same USB stick by booting into it from the BIOS/UEFI. Your license is pulled from the Microsoft Servers so once you are online so if the setup prompts you to put in a key you can select the option to skip it.

========================WARNING========================

If you have a realtek WiFi or LAN (Ethernet) or Audio chip in your PC/Tablet/Hybrid, be careful, because the realtek drivers are terrible and they almost never provide updates for newer OSs and when they do, they are very half assed.

My Lenovo Q190, Windows 8.1 with Bing mini desktop HTPC has a realtek ethernet NIC and its supposed to be gigabit, and it was under Windows 8.1, but as of Windows 10 is being throttled to fast ethernet speeds (10/100).

If you have the original Q190 that had a regular home version of Windows 8 that needed to be upgraded to 8.1, the WiFi card on that is a realtek and was non functional after the Windows 8.1 update and will be worse with the throttled ethernet speeds.

Just be careful with driver support on Windows 10!!!!!

Good luck and YMMV.