Windows 7 nag screen...

[John Rumm]

They stopped pushing out automatic upgrades, and announced the end of the free program. However no one seem to have told their media creation tool :-)

I believe you can use the tool for a clean install using a win 7 / 8.1 key - although I have not tried. You however can still perform an in situ upgrade. It keeps all apps and data intact, and saves the old windows folder in a windows.old folder (which you can use the disk cleanup tool to remove should you want the space back)

You may not be able to do a 32bit to 64bit upgrade though.

Yes certainly. I did it on my laptop last week and it was fine[1].

Go here:

Run tool, wait (lots of downloading), select "upgrade this PC" option and follow though the prompts.

[1] It was more hassle on this machine than I have had previously since there was not sufficient space on the system reserved partition to do it. In the end I had to give it a bit of a poke[2] with the command line to make a new larger reserved partition in some previously unallocated space. [2] The upgrade process needs a few hundred meg on the system reserved partition to work. Most of the time there will be plenty of space. However now and then (usually on machines that were originally HDD and were cloned to a smaller SSD) the system reserved partition may have been shrunk "to fit" and not have the space. The easy fix for this is to create a new partition, and transfer required boot paraphernalia to it, then promote it to being the active partition.

Just in case anyone needs to do the same:

Go into disk management (right click on Computer / This PC, select Manage, then click Disk Management at the bottom of the tree view on the left).

Create a new simple partition of at least 400 MB, and give it a drive letter - say G:

Open a command prompt with admin privilege (search for CMD, the right click and choose "run as administrator")

To copy required info to the new reserved partition type:

bcdboot c:\windows /s g:

Now enter the disk partition tool:

diskpart

In the tool, select your new volume:

select volume g

Make it active:

active

Exit the tool:

exit

Go back to disk management, and remove the drive letter from the reserved partition.

[T i m]

I think I remember two 'automatic phases, one where it popped up and offered itself to you and a second where you could activate it (possibly online), possibly after it had been stopped 'officially'.

That's all I have done (with the Media Creation Tool).

That would be handy then. ;-)

Seen.

Agreed, I don't believe you can.

Cool. ;-)

Yup, that's where I normally go but seldom on the PC I'm actually thinking of upgrading (I just download the image and put it on USB/DVD to use elsewhere etc).

Ok.

I would have used Gparted for that from a LiveDVD/USB?

Ah.

Hmm, I'm not sure I'd call that 'easy' but ... ;-)

I'm not sure that's the sort of thing I would ever rely on from memory (these days). ;-(

Thanks, I'll give it a go.

Cheers, T i m

[John Rumm]

It did...

Not officially - although the web guidance is somewhat open to interpretation.

At a guess, 32. but note I have not tried doing an upgrade on a 32 bit version.

(you could always clone the drive for safety, and then try)

You may be able to do a clean install of 64 bit with the existing umber though.

[Geo]

Possibly KB 4524752 which was inflicted mid October.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

I have both home and pro here. Both still updating. Usually once a week on a Tuesday. Last update was pretty massive.

[nothanks]

For a while I've been wondering whether to risk changing from W7 to W10, but this thread gave me the poke I needed. The process was quick(ish), painless and (so far) everything seems to work. YMMV, of course.

[T i m]

<snip>

Result.

Of course.

It's strange, I 'like' W10 as a desktop solution in the same way as I 'like' Linux (say Mint) as a desktop solution in that it generally installs fairly automagically (so that's the first .0001% of their life) but doesn't make doing some things as easy as you know they can be, in my case compared with W7.

Ignoring any of the hardware automagic stuff (not normally an issue to me on Windows and needn't be an issue if someone else has been though it and documented a solution that will actually work when copy >

pasted on Linux) but with W10 I'm often happy when I've gone past the W10 UI / DE crap and am back to what I know and works from say W7.

That's not to say that I can't deal with the 'superfluous' crap on W10, just that I don't need / use it and it just gets in the way.

I don't necessarily want it to be like W7 in it's looks / layout (in the same way I don't run a Linux that looks like Windows), I just begrudge all the idiot steps you often have to click past to get to thing things that are really going to make a difference. That's not that you can't get to those things directly via an alternative mouse click, just that I would prefer not to have to.

I know I'm going to have to move away from XP, especially as this particular install is getting fairly long in the tooth now, it's just that it's like a comfy old glove that still actually works for 90% of what I need and I'm not looking forward to having to break a new one in. ;-(

Cheers, T i m

[bert]

You select the option during install - or so I was told by MS but I haven't tried it yet.

[Mike Halmarack]

<snip>

You are a true Champion John. It never occurred to me that this method of upgrade was available or even possible. I've just used your suggestion to upgrade my computer with ten years worth of Windows 7 pro apps and docs on it. The end result is that you wouldn't know there has been any change at all unless you looked at "This PC > Properties..." I was dreading what turned out to be a beautifully simple and trouble free solution. Thanks a bunch!

[David]

I'm surprised you've not yet embraced Windows 10, Brian. I thought that the accessibility features had been vastly improved since Windows 7 was designed all those years ago? (not that I use accessibility features)

Perhaps you have other reasons to stick with Windows 7 though?

[nothanks]

Hmm, it is not as painless as I thought. The basics worked fine but the Windows account privileges were screwed-up in the process and I just had to waste several hours sorting it out in order to be able to reinstall my back-up software (Crashplan), which stopped working after the change to W10.

[John Rumm]

Yup sometimes these things actually work better than expected. Glad yours went ok (and I don't think I have had any that have had any serious problems. Some laptops may get a bit of bundled bloatware removed in the process, but that's not usually a loss!)

[Chris Hogg]

+100

I've just upgraded my reserve PC (W7 Home Premium 32 bit) using the media creation tool, after first having made a disk image on an external HDD in a caddy using Acronis, in case it all went t*ts up. But apart from taking nearly four hours to complete (!), it all went smoothly.

I find I'm much happier with W10 on the PC than I was with W10 on the little laptop that I'd referred to in another thread. I think the problem there was that the laptop was stuffed full of mfrs bloatware and I couldn't see my way through to getting the machine working anything like what I was familiar with in W7, coupled with a tiny and non-upgradeable memory. Anyhow, I gave it to a local charity who needed a small laptop for one specific purpose only, and they're making good use of it.

I've still got some tweaking to do on the reserve PC, but when I've sorted that out, I'll have a go at updating this one (W7 professional,

64 bit). I'm using the reserve PC to feel my way. Two things I've noticed so far - upgrading to W10 managed to lose all the usenet messages in my various folders in Agent. It's not a big problem, as I can probably copy them all over from this PC, but it would have been nice if they hadn't disappeared.

The second thing is that when I switch on my W7 PC, the first screen that comes up after Windows has loaded is the one showing me the various users, and I select which one to log in with. There are just two, one with administrator rights, the other is simply a 'user' without those rights. I would normally use the latter, because AIUI there's less chance of getting infected with malware than when running as an administrator. But now I've updated to W10, only one user appears on the opening screen, the one without administrator rights. I would like the option to be able to log on as either, but I don't yet see how to get both users to appear on that opening screen in order to make the choice. Can anyone tell me what I have to do?

[Andy Burns]

maybe the manufacturer had set the laptop in "tablet mode"?

There's a toggle on the activity centre (from the bottom right sepech bubble icon) it seems to confuse the hell out of people when they accidentally click it ... try it see if that's how the laptop felt, you can just toggle it off again to get back to normal.

[nothanks]

On 27/11/2019 14:22, Chris Hogg wrote: ... snipped

I followed the instructions here:

[Chris Hogg]

The first option seems to have worked. Thanks.

[John Rumm]

nice one...

What folder does Agent use to store messages?

[Chris Hogg]

I _think_ it's C:/users/myname/appdata/roaming/forte/agent. I should actually have a look there on my reserve PC (the one I've just updated to W10), as the messages might all be there but Agent just might not picking them up.

[Thomas Prufer]

Agent looks for the database with the messages in the directory in which it starts in. Here it's the "start in" directory in the shortcut to agent; it also picks up the settings from Agent.ini in that directory.

Thomas Prufer