I have a laptop that is running very slowly and needs a great deal of TLC. The only thing I use it for now is storing photo’s which I’m going to backup on an external hard drive.

The laptop is eligible for the W10 upgrade and I’m in the queue, however rather than simply upgrading the OS, I’d like to format the laptop and start afresh.

When I bought the laptop it didn’t come with the original media, it came with a back-up service / option (PC world set up).

I’m a bit out of touch with these things and want to get the laptop into better shape and wanted to know if there were any alternatives to formatting the Hard Drive.

If it’s on Windows 8.1 you should have the inbuilt feature which allows a refresh or re-install:

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-8/restore-refresh-reset-pc

Obviously make sure you do a backup of all your files before doing this.

I just did something similar.

You will need to do an upgrade first, then use one of the various utilities to get your new Windows 10 product key,as it is different from the win 7/8 one.

Take a note of it and then reinstall a fresh copy onto the formatted HD, using the noted down product key.

I’m not sure of its exact behaviour, but the W10 installer asks you what you want to keep and “nothing” is an option. I’d probably just do that TBH.

Actually I think I may be wrong if you are doing a fresh install on your existing HD as it will look for the win 7 keys on the disk before it starts. I moved to a new drive.

On modern PCs the windows licence key is held in the BIOS and accessed automatically by Windows during installation, this applies to W8 and W10

I’ve just updated a 4 year old laptop from 7 to 10. Initial update over windows 7 took a rather tedious 4 hours.

I needed to replace the hard drive as it was reporting a number of disk errors. It took less than an hour to physically swap out the knackered hard drive for a new one and do a fresh install of 10 (using the create installation media tool).

I did not need to enter a license key for the fresh install on the new disk.

Initial update over windows 7 took a rather tedious 4 hours.

Mine was at 16% before I left for a 5 mile run, and it was at 84% when I got back…

took me 40mins to update from Win8 to Win10 – and only a week of swearing at it to consider going back – good OS, but I think it’s only 95% finished.

took me 40mins to update from Win8 to Win10 –

My desktop took around the same amount of time. No idea why the laptop took so damn long.

It does seem to be a bit of a lottery. Going from 7 to 10 on the desktop took a couple of hours. Going from Vista to 7 took *forever*.

On the same “refreshing an old heap” vein what are folks thoughts on Vista?

I have an ancient P4 Dell 4500 desktop that runs XP happily enough and I’m considering upgrading it to the much maligned Vista for the simple convenience of security updates for the forseeable future. Legit copy, I have Dreamspark access and a spare copy of Vista Pro I’m eleigible for so figure I may as well try it but not sure if it’s a waste of time. Can’t be that bad by now surely?

It’s only the “workshop” computer so really FF, Foxit and Winamp are my top priorities. WIFI card is stupid so Lubuntu not a convenient option.