To what extent is the upgrade install usable? I know "upgrade then clean install" is always the preferable method, but just wondering if I could use the upgrade install for a while, till I backup everything and prepare for a clean install. What kind of issues can one expect? What will be broken and will need fixing? Are there a lot of driver issues to be had? Overall, do I expect a lot of work to be done to make the upgade istall usable for everday use? 10x
That's the kind of question that you'll only find out when you actually do it. While my machine could do a problem free upgrade yours could do one with some problems. So, if you have something to backup, backup before doing the upgrade just for your safety.
words of wisdom. make a full image of the HDD with your favorite backup software make the upgrade, see how it goes (keeps apps and documents), if it fails or faults. Do a "reset" (wipes everything away) and you will get your clean install that way.
Very usable update method. Better than I have ever encountered on Windows upgrades and am more than happy with performance. The test upgrades I have done today included the previous updates for 10240 since the 15th July and the latest nvidia (also included in that) runs smoothly - ensure you check for updates at the start of the upgrade as there are some. Remember to follow the advise from others to do a complete backup before starting this upgrade. Ensure you are upto date with your graphics driver if running nvidia particularly - there was an issue upgrading 8.1 with drivers not upto 353.30 and am not sure that is still the case. Remember to follow the advise from others to do a complete backup before starting this upgrade. Depends on your setup and the state of what you are upgrading from. In my case, re-install of Intel chipset drivers has always been required throughout the insider program and microsoft beta testing from years gone by. Steam games may require a game cache integrity check to update local files. Generally though on 5 rigs (2 on Win7 Pro, 2 on 8.1 Pro and 1 that has been dedicated to Win10 throughout) I've upgraded the aforementioned today for the last check before the 29th and they all run like new systems. This is from my own experiences from Upgrading my systems and your system will no doubt differ from this experience. Remember to follow the advise from others to do a complete backup before starting this upgrade.
I maded an upgrade from windows 7 to 10240. I had a lot of software, games and reinstaling them might took me a lot of precious time so upgrade was the best ideea. The only thing that wasn't kept was "kms tool" and "nvidia driver". Everything works perfectly. The activation was on their servers kept in memory because I was playing before with insider preview 10166 upgraded to 10240 (in dual boot with 7 modded bios). When I saw that 10240 might be RTM and pretty stabile I decided to make the final move. At upgrade I used a local menu and I was not even asked to enter a key. The upgrade is fully activated. Don't use OldNewExplorer tweak because Word (from Office 2013 will not open). At first I thought the upgrade was unsuccesfull but it was that crappy tweak causing the problem. They say it supports Windows 10 but it ruins Paint, Wordpad, and Word (not Excel or others). I'm using startisback++RC2 and it's more than perfect (Classic Shell can kiss my b..t) - that's for psychotic persons who loves precisely organized startmenu (like me).
of course it's usable. they are upgrading a billion pcs and all but .00001 percent of those are owned by people who wouldn't know how to do a clean install if their lives depended on it so if it wasn't usable it wouldn't be happening.