Upgrading Windows7 to Win10 for free

[kc]

Jon's comment " You can pick up a 120 gig SSD for as little as £15 " got me thinking that that would be a worthwhile thing to do and in effect do a clean install yet keep the old data on the old disk. Indeed it seems it's possible to buy a known brand like Crucial or Kingston 120gb for 17 to 19 pounds. Well worth while but it's a matter of knowing what type of disk would fit - this is a Dell Inspiron 530 desktop - and the Crucial website suggests a MX500 or the much cheaper BX500 so that seems OK. It's just a matter of knowing what cables and adaptors to order as well.

Of course i would be happy to take my own computer to pieces and play around inserting new bits knowing that if it all goes badly wrong well all I have lost is an old computer. But the computer needing updating is my wife's and if I foul that up I will never hear the last of it!

[Gary Manuel]

Updating to the latest version is not always the best thing to do chaps - especially if your computer wasn't designed for it. You might just make things worse than they are now.

I have an old Laptop that I only use for CCTV capture of a Nest-Box camera via a radio link. It was initial set up for Windows XP, but I updated it to Windows 7 a number of years ago. It was never quite happy running Windows 7 and due to the usual regular Windows 7 updates the Laptop had slowed down to a crawl. Only last week, I decided to rebuild it from scratch. I used Windows XP Pro SP3 (POSReady) - 32 bit version. POSReady is the name given to the version of XP that was supported by Microsoft in systems with embedded operating systems (ATMs, Cash Registers, Supermaket tills etc) beyond the XP end of life date. It runs perfectly now because it's not struggling with an operating system it wasn't designed for. The best bit is that because MS are no longer supporting XP, there should be no future updates to slow it down .

It might become susceptible to new virus attacks in the future, but who's going to waste time writing them for a system which has officially been unsupported for over 10 years? I only switch WiFi on when needed as my Laptop has a convenient external switch.

Video HERE shows how to get XP updates until April 2019 (maybe beyond?) for anyone who wants to try it. I used an alternative method, which I can't share on here.

Edited By Gary Manuel on 13/01/2020 12:59:16

[Jon H]

As long as you choose any standard 2.5' inch SSD then it will use the standard SATAIII Interface. This is backwards compatible with older motherboards with SATAII controllers so they will more or less work with anything.

The differnces between MX, BX, and all the other flavours from the various brands is usually down to the type of flash memory used in the drive, its cache, controller, sustained read/write performance and random read/write performance.

For general day to day computing none of it matters, just choose the cheapest.

[john stones 1 - Moderator]

I best stop reading, eyes are glazing over.

[kc]

I think I will order a 120GB SSD to put in this desktop, but it's not clear what mounting parts and cables should be ordered too. Any ideas what cable is likely needed to put this in as an extra disk in a desktop?

[Maurice Dyer]

Upgrading from 7 to 10 ??

You'll be sorrrryyyyyy.......

[Jon H]

Posted by kc on 13/01/2020 16:12:22:

I think I will order a 120GB SSD to put in this desktop, but it's not clear what mounting parts and cables should be ordered too. Any ideas what cable is likely needed to put this in as an extra disk in a desktop?

All you need is a standard SATA cable (10 a penny on ebay or similar) and a SATA power connector which should already be spare inside the computer. If you whip the side panel off and have a rummage around to see what spare connectors are coming off the power supply.

[kc]

Many thanks Jon thats the info I needed.

[Chris Bott - Moderator]

KC just before you order, are you able to inspect the original drive?

If old enough it could be a PATA drive. That's a parallel connection rather than SATA which is serial.

PATA will have a wide connector with many wires that takes up most of the width of the drive. SATA will be a much narrower cable with only a few wires.

[Tony Harrison 2]

Posted by Maurice Dyer on 13/01/2020 16:36:28:

Upgrading from 7 to 10 ??

You'll be sorrrryyyyyy.......

I wonder why? Most people aren't. WinXP and W7 were good, W10 is better.

rgds Tony

[Jon H]

Posted by Chris Bott - Moderator on 13/01/2020 16:53:36:

KC just before you order, are you able to inspect the original drive?

If old enough it could be a PATA drive. That's a parallel connection rather than SATA which is serial.

PATA will have a wide connector with many wires that takes up most of the width of the drive. SATA will be a much narrower cable with only a few wires.

Good point. I was assuming the system was new enough. Its easy to tell though as you say. Big flat ribbon leads means its time for the bin!

[Peter Jenkins]

Well, I tried the Which? link route. The download seemed to go OK but then it all got hung up on the window "Setup is Cleaning before Installing" at 46% done. Sat there for 20 mins with nothing happening other than the spinning gizmo. So, have found a Win 10 with software key on Amazon and gone for that instead. Worth trying mind you - just didn't work for me on my laptop.

[kc]

Chris, I have not looked inside yet ( because it's my wife's machine and one needs permission!) but the spec that comes up on startup says SATA IDE Serial ATA support and also the Crucial website suggests their MX 500 or BX500 for upgrades on this Dell Inspiron 530. So I suppose SATA would be correct

[Chris Bott - Moderator]

KC that's good news. Jon is right, a PATA one really would be too old to be worthwhile.

With a laptop, I'd think that there will be a small cover you can remove to get at the disk. So no need to take it all apart. Whether you go down the new install or the clone route, you'll always have the option to pop the old disk back in to restore it to exactly how it is now.

[Jon H]

to clone from a laptop you will need a usb drive caddy as they can usually only support one internal drive.

KC, the Dell 530 looks like its an old core 2 quad machine. Its pretty old and slow by the standards of today but an SSD will be compatible and will offer increased performance. The core 2's were supported by the G33 chipset which only supports SATAII so you dont get the full speed of your new SSD but it will be a significant improvement over a hard drive of that generation.

An alternative would be a whole system upgrade. You dont have to go new, 2nd hand but newer might be a good way to go.

[Guest]

I recently installed an SSD drive in my 10yr old PC which came with an early version of WIN 7 on it. I did not go down clone route as I had a spare bay, installed the SSD in that and reloaded 7 fresh with all the updates. Until I reloaded all the programs needed, I could always switch between the 2 systems at start up if required.

I took precaution of unplugging the existing WIN 7 HDD before installing the new one and when I reconnected it, the new WIN simply saw it as another HDD.

I had no problems with the installation but I did have to be careful on Drive lettering as the new Win 7 assigned letters as normal and these differed from the old WIN lettering. One of these days, I might get round to commoning them up.

The difference in speed , particularly at start up and shut down is substantial and made the effort worthwhile.

If installing a SSD in a standard PC bay, you need an installation kit as the SSD is smaller than the bay. SSD suppliers will have the necessary kit for a few £'s

Hope you find this useful.

[Jon H]

Posted by John Laird on 14/01/2020 09:14:02:

If installing a SSD in a standard PC bay, you need an installation kit as the SSD is smaller than the bay. SSD suppliers will have the necessary kit for a few £'s

On occasion i have been lazy and just slapped them in with double sided foam tape

[Bob Cotsford]

Posted by Chris Bott - Moderator on 14/01/2020 08:09:55:

KC that's good news. Jon is right, a PATA one really would be too old to be worthwhile.

With a laptop, I'd think that there will be a small cover you can remove to get at the disk. So no need to take it all apart. Whether you go down the new install or the clone route, you'll always have the option to pop the old disk back in to restore it to exactly how it is now.

Not on an Acer Aspire there isn't Chris! Reading this thread finally nudged me to buy an SSD for my laptop. It's not a bad spec, i7 2.4Ghz, 8Gb of RAM, 1 tb disc but it does get a bit sluggish starting up,running scans, installing updates and, oddly, starting Companion. In part this will depend on whether the schools have just emptied, slowing down internet access nationally, but I TaskMaster Manager shows high disk usage at times so I ordered a Samsung 860EVO 1TB disc - I was taught if you're going, go BIG

It's not the hardest of jobs even without a disc access panel. Clone the system using a USB-SATA cable, battery out, 18 screws to loosen the bottom of the case, 3 ribbon connectors and lift the bottom clear. One more cable then two screws to remove the disc carrier. Reverse once the new disc is in, then cross fingers and switch on.

Now the only questions are - in how many ways will I cock this up and how many of the 18 screws will be found when it comes time to reassemble it?

[John Robertson 3]

"... how many of the 18 screws will be found when it comes time to reassemble it? …"

17. Naturally!

[alex nicol]

Could be worse, you fit all 18 screws and still have holes left over !!!!

[kc]

I started this thread so that perhaps someone else could update their old computer without making the (almost) richest man in the world even richer. Actually it's not just the money but the principle which motivated me - dumping working equipment just because it's been deliberately crippled to sell new stuff offends me.

This thread has proved that the forum has so many people with a wide range of useful knowledge on subjects other than aeromodelling! Thanks chaps. Recently I also used the knowledge of the forum members about boiler replacement. The inside knowledge from heating engineers, computer people and all the other professions is so useful. It shows that aeromodelling attracts a wide range of interesting people and thats also what makes a trip to the flying field so worthwhile. It's not just flying your own plane and watching others it's the between flying chatter that is such a part of club flying. If only the weather was good enough to fly at the moment...........but we have the forum to keep our interest between flying sessions!

[Jon H]

All of my flying this winter has been virtual. I play a combat flight sim online and do my best to wipe out the luftwaffe in a collection of Yaks, Laggs, P38,9 and 40, Tempest, Spitfire etc.

Its good fun but hard work. It also keeps my up until 2am most friday nights. I get carried away

[brokenenglish]

Good news (I think!).

I've just installed W10 using exactly the procedure mentioned by kc in the OP.
It worked perfectly first time, for free.
It was a bit long (several hours), but this may be because I'm outside "normal" Internet coverage and I use a 4G USB stick.

If I'd known it was that easy, and free, I would have upgraded long ago. I think I was put off by the many reported troubles in the early days.
Anyway, this thread gave me just the boot in the backplate that I needed.
Thanks everyone!

Edited By brokenenglish on 14/01/2020 18:27:58

[FlyinFlynn]

For those interested in obtaining the benefit of quicker data transfers might like to think about the data bus that they are connecting their SSD to. It is true you can just buy an SSD to SATA adapter, slot your new SSD in and away you go....but if you do that you will probably be missing out on the SSD's potential. If you use the SATA bus you should remember that the maximum data throughput for the ubiquitous SATA rev2 is 3Gbits per second , which is about 300MBytes per second.....about the same as the later hard disks. In order to achieve the higher rates you hear about you need to fit the SSD to a SATA rev3 socket, this has double the throughput of a SATA rev2. Older motherboards may not be SATA 3 compliant. For much greater speed increases, later motherboards have a SATA Express port which utilises the PCI bus as well as two SATA channels There are also SSD's that just fit straight onto the PCI data bus, either directly, via an adapter, or via a different form factor, like M.2 where 4GBytes a second are commonly achieved. That's a ten fold increase over the best HDD and SATA rev2..

In short....it can be a mine field so make sure you know what you want and understand the benefits you could expect.

No doubt there will be someone who will say "I fitted mine to a standard SATA socket and the speed increased no end"...to which I would reply " it shows how crappy your HDD was then"

Edited By FlyinFlynn on 15/01/2020 15:18:32

[Jon H]

Posted by FlyinFlynn on 15/01/2020 15:18:08:

For those interested in obtaining the benefit of quicker data transfers might like to think about the data bus that they are connecting their SSD to. It is true you can just buy an SSD to SATA adapter, slot your new SSD in and away you go....but if you do that you will probably be missing out on the SSD's potential. If you use the SATA bus you should remember that the maximum data throughput for the ubiquitous SATA rev2 is 3Gbits per second , which is about 300MBytes per second.....about the same as the later hard disks. In order to achieve the higher rates you hear about you need to fit the SSD to a SATA rev3 socket, this has double the throughput of a SATA rev2. Older motherboards may not be SATA 3 compliant. For much greater speed increases, later motherboards have a SATA Express port which utilises the PCI bus as well as two SATA channels There are also SSD's that just fit straight onto the PCI data bus, either directly, via an adapter, or via a different form factor, like M.2 where 4GBytes a second are commonly achieved. That's a ten fold increase over the best HDD and SATA rev2..

In short....it can be a mine field so make sure you know what you want and understand the benefits you could expect.

No doubt there will be someone who will say "I fitted mine to a standard SATA socket and the speed increased no end"...to which I would reply " it shows how crappy your HDD was then"

Edited By FlyinFlynn on 15/01/2020 15:18:32

This was covered earlier in the thread and we have pretty decent path through those mines as, frankly, its not that complicated.

In any case, you wont get 300meg sustained reads/writes from a mechanical drive. I have two machines at home and have built 4 for the company here using SSD's on SATAII interfaces. Just turning the thing on shows the advantage the SSD brings in boot time and a quick check with crystal disk will clearly demonstrate the superiority of the SSD. SSD's are also leaps and bounds ahead in terms of random read/write performance which is what will make the system feel 'snappy' when you use it. As was discussed before, while some performance will be left on the table if using the older interface you will still be better off with an SSD for booting and a HDD for mass storage.

One thing i did forget to mention earlier to the SSD upgrade crowd, make sure you dont fill the drive up. SSD's need a certain amount of free space to do magical things internally for maintenance. Always leave yourself a good bit of space on the drive.