I'll try with LTSB then and see if that one works at least, will post back results soon. Appreciate the help with this so far, it's been leagues more helpful than elsewhere.
Thank you so much! I dug up a 2015 LTSB ISO & it finally worked. I'll install LTSB then upgrade to LTSC 2021.
@ShanzW7User You're welcome Keep in mind that upgrading from 2015 to a newer version not always ends well for some user profiles (that's why I never suggest that path as first choice) , better to make an additional fresh a new user before proceeding to upgrade, just in case you can't log on with your main user, after the process.
My bad, replied to the wrong post. I appreciate the help from everyone in the thread, had no headway anywhere else. So far profile is okay, I've started cleanup from the proccess. Everything is fine except the boot time has gotten a bit longer. Currently doing further system level cleanup with glary and other tools (removing old W7 specific drivers, cleaning up system and temp files from the transition, registry cleanup & defragging the drive) and things are running well enough, everything works I've been able to update without issue and install my W10 tweaks for LTSC2021. I'd like to ask if you have any suggestions for further cleanup or any tools I could use to get as clean of a profile/installation as I can? Overall though it's worked pretty well and I'd say the test with the laptop looks good, should be smooth sailing doing it for real on the desktop.
Does anyone have any suggestions for profile cleanup after an in-place upgrade from 7 to 10? My boot time has gotten a fair bit slower, I've already... -Cleaned up the registry with glary utils -Started removing older obsolete drivers and programs -Run disk cleanup through both windows (to remove old W7 installation files) and glary to cleanout any temp data & cache, namely the data from the transition (but kept the logs around) -Updated the new install -Installing new device drivers meant for windows 10 -Defragged the HDD using glary utils including doing a pass on it during startup
Obviously hardware limitations. Maybe its time for more RAM, SSD, or whatever, to effectively boost performances.
There is nothing obvious here, Win10 usually boots faster than win7 even in a 15 years old PC, unless you're trying to use it with 512MB of RAM. Then obviously investing 20$ on a 256GB SDD surely changes the life, but that's true for win7 as well @ShanzW7User Dont rely on stupid automated tools. LTSC is already decently cleaned up, except for Defender that must be really disabled / nuclearized. Then use something like autoruns.exe to disable unwanted bloat (dragged from the old installation) from startup.
Glary's actually reputable even among power users, and I've had better results with it than by hand at times. Geek uninstall catches reg entries and cache files for drivers left over, ghost buster for drivers that are no longer in use, etc. Seems fine, just wondering if there's other bases I should cover I don't know of. Hardware wise it's fine. It's got another OS on the NVME, HDD is a WD black 2TB that's only a few years old, 16GB RAM. It's likely just the OS install and ocean of old ass drivers, services and dependencies for stuff holding me back. I just noticed it was starting a little slower than it was on 7 which is odd because even on HDD 10 starts significantly faster. I'm probably going to swap for a bigger NVME drive and clone the OS at some point. But for now mostly making sure I have the process down for when I try to tackle it with the desktop that has far more finnicky things on it. **Edit Finished running cleanup on it and patching things up. Boot time was initally taking 8min~ when I was still working on things, but it's down to 1min or so. Not bad for HDD, I think it's safe to say it's a smooth transition and clean install. Thanks for everyone's help on this!
Quick update on this, so it went through seamlessly on the laptop, which is a pretty similar but stripped down version of my desktop in terms of everything on it. However drivers had zero issue. On the flip side, with the desktop I've not even been able to get off of LTSB, as since upgrading the desktop will now randomly crash. I've traced it through event viewer and the BSOD info, that it seems to be from the drivers, but I can't install anything from windows update, install LTSC, or install the driver packages without the system immediately crashing as soon as it tries to install. SFC & DISM went through fine with no issues, OS seems fine, it just seems to be that the drivers aren't liking LTSB. Any advice for further troubleshooting?
Start in safe mode, uninstall all 3rd party drivers *from the device manager* (using the checkmark to delete them), then reboot normally and see what WU provides. If anything is still missing reinstall the proprietary drivers ONE by ONE and test how it works. If the PC crashes after a proprietary driver installation you have spotted the culprit.
Was trying that but windows keeps fighting me due to having a dual boot. I did manage to install win10 compat AMD chipset drivers after 2 attempts but still got crashes. I was reading that the Ryzen 5's have issues in older versions of Windows 10 (like LTSB). Could also be the modified driver package I installed for 7 originally with my chipset. But yeah I'll try to get it into safe mode again and see what I can do. I was looking over the event viewer and bsod dumps. The bsods always display: clock_watchdog_timeout which tells me it's the driver's for the chipset, and then either complaining about CPU or Memory. And just to explain, the other OS I have installed on the desktop is LTSC 2021. And it has continued to function just fine during all this. So I know it's not the hardware it's self but the drivers on the 7 install post upgrade.
I guess you are using the idiotic metro bootloader. Setting it in legacy mode should be the first thing a sane user should do after an installation of anything after Win7
Oh no other way around, the legacy loader is what I was using that gave me trouble, ignoring the hotkeys for startup options. The metro loader has it built into the GUI so I was able to get in. I'm also installing the drivers through my board manufacturer this time rather than direct from AMD.
Hotkeys? You need to push F8 then select the desired option. Easy and (unlike the metro bootmanager) works BEFORE loading any OS. The metro bootmanager needs most of the default OS loaded to choose. If you screw it you can have another 15 OSes installed and you can't boot in any of them. And assuming everything works, if you need to use a non default OS, you need to load default one, THEN reboot to the chosen one In short the metro BM is one of the stupidest and dangerous things ever released by MS
I agree, F8 just wasn't working with the legacy loader for whatever reason. Back to the main point though, while thankfully the system doesn't crash in safe mode, disabling most non windows services and all apps on startup hasn't helped, or at least I've yet to find the culprit 3rd party service. Also further driver installs have not really helped either and the only info I can get from the bsod dumps are generic kernel errors besides the CPU warning that shows when it bsods rather than freezes. **Update The machine freezes up even in safe mode after awhile.
Then do a parallel fresh installation in a different partition or (way better in a native vhdx) and see if it works. If it still doesn't work, you know that the build has troubles with your HW for whatever reason, or your HW has some fault that went undetected by the old OS but become apparent with the new one. If it works you have a parallel working OS, you can use as a template to compare the drivers installed and other settings, or just you can migrate your profile and documents there, and when you have finished and 100% satisfied, you can delete the old one.
Yeah my secondary W10 ltsc install has been fine the whole time. I managed to get it to work though and the solution is pretty terrible. I had read early on that the Ryzen 5 series has issues with older versions of Windows 10 but I figured since I got it working on 7, that probably doesn't apply here. That was the problem all along, but I couldn't do anything about it because unless LTSB is fully updated it will frequently crash/freeze/BSOD with a Ryzen 5. I spent the last several hours slowly downloading / installing windows updates until it would crash or freeze then rebooting to try again. Eventually it started successfully downloading and installing one or two at a time. Once I had them all the BSODs stopped and I was finally able to upgrade with and LTSC 2021 ISO. **(Small sidenote for anyone else following this, do not allow the ISO to configure updates prior to upgrading, untick that option. When upgrading from 7 to 10 I kept finding it would fail if that was left enabled)
Then you can try with a bit of nice surgery Rename (or move somewhere) \windows\system32\config\system and all the system.something files on the crashing machine, then copy the files from the working one do the same with the folder \windows\system32\drivers Then try to reboot on the crashing system That's more or less all the system configuration and a large part of the needed drivers. If still crash this way light up a candle in a church and pray