Win 10 'upgrade' is it worth the effort?

Another thing that makes upgrading a good choice is that when you decide to sell the PC because you need a new one, it will probably be worth more if a registered version of Windows 10 can be installed to it.

Many thanks for the comments, how best to create an image of my system before updating?, can i burn to a DVD?

Creating an image is easy, restoring is what takes some experience.
But in that respect, Drive snapshot is an imaging software with one amazing and unique feature: it can overwrite the current c: drive without ever needing to boot a rescue system. It has a fully functional trial version: http://www.drivesnapshot.de/en/down.htm and needs no installation.
You should not burn the image but create it onto an external usb hard drive.

You can use your OS's integrated backup program for that, or a third party tool (easier to use), for example paragon backup and recovery, which is very easy to use, and if your PC is used privately you can use the free version:

http://www.paragon-software.com/home/br-free/

You can backup to a USB disk, or to a location on your LAN, or probably also to cloud services like OneDrive or Dropbox provided there is enough free space there, and you have a good internet bandwidth.

what i would do is image the disk to another empty drive; then you can upgrade one, and reverting is simply replacing the drive

Thank you for the recent comments, JH your write up was very interesting..

I had a look at those backup programs, (i was assuming i might be able to that more easily but it seems not), the drive snapshot only works for 30days then requires you to buy, which isnt great, the other one from paragon has a lot of negative comments on download.com so im not feeling too encouraged by that.. also i only have a usb flash disc to hand but it wont use that, and how much space am i likely to need for the win7 OS only?... its all a bit unclear !  so far im feeling i could do without the aggro this 'update' might incur!,

What about windows backup and restore, it seems to imply it can create a 'system image' or a 'backup repair' but then perhaps you would need win7 installed to 'restore' it so perhaps thats the flaw in that one ?

What about windows backup and restore, it seems to imply it can create a 'system image' or a 'backup repair' but then perhaps you would need win7 installed to 'restore' it so perhaps thats the flaw in that one ?

Just start the computer from Win 7 Setup USB or DVD and select Repair computer and select System Image recovery and load the recovery image to restore.

The problem is there are chances that backup is made which cannot be restored somehow.

I've been using Paragon and have never had any problems with it. I doubt those comments you saw about it are correct.

The space needed for your backup depends on how much space is used by your system already. Paragon can compress the backup so you can expect the backup to be maybe 1/3 smaller than what your system uses up now. But that compression depends a lot on what types of files you are mainly backing up. The windows backup tool doesn't do compression, or not much, so you can expect the backed up image to take almost as much space as your current system uses.

A USB stick isn't a good backup media. Get USB disks for that.

Anyway, what have you been using to backup to until now? You must be aware that regular backups are the most important thing to do on any PC, smart phone, tablet etc... so you must have media to backup to... If you haven't been doing backups, that must be your most important task now. Get a USB dock, and then some cheap standard HD's you can drop into that dock and backup your systems to. The dock in the link below is a good example:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816856104&cm_re=usb_hard_disk_dock-_-16-856-104-_-Product

If you are going to use the Windows backup tool you will nee old disks (5 years or older), as the backup program of Windows 7 needs 512 sector disks to work. The current disks use 4k sector technology and won't work with Windows built-in backup. With 3rd party backup tools like paragong that is no problem.

Actually, I think that you are running out of time as it will take a rather long time unless you take the clean install approach which takes about three hours for me.

Just back up your data and proceed with the windows 10 upgrade. Finding one spare and not filled up external hard disk is a difficult task for me.

i also use paragon and can recommend it

"the drive snapshot only works for 30days then requires you to buy" - wrong. After 30 days, you cannot create new backups, but you can restore old backups forever :-) Try it, no installation needed.

Also, once Windows 10 has been installed on a machine, you can reinstall Windows 10 "forever"

Please note the "deadline" (29th July) on this question is now off the table for now. You can still continue to upgrade whenever you want it, as long as you "lie" about using on of MS's assigned Assistive Technology (there's no check on MS's side to actually check if you really use it or not).

Just thought ild post some progress, apologies for the pause, (you can blame that on how long it takes to update to win10!).  I did manage to make a system backup using paragon (although paragons first screen where it shows you the drives and partitions is a bit confusing), i managed to borrow a WD passport drive, and was surprised how quickly it managed to save the files (brings me on to a usb 3.0 question.. but later).

I then tried to update to win10, i got stuck on a screen that said something like 'downloading etc' but no other info apart from this.. when you are stuck for some hours you begin to wonder if anything is happening at all, or did it just get hung up somewhere ?? .. note to ms couldnt you warn people of just how long the update will take (like take a day out because your machine isnt going to be useable) , and also put up some messages to indicate that 'any' kind of progress is being made.. i could imagine some people pulling the plug or switching off/rebooting after some hours of nothing happening.. things did eventually progress and then seemed to transfer to windows update and popped a red cross message saying that the update had failed, this was about 2hrs before the free upgrade ends.. so i ended up leaving the machine on overnight, to return to another 'failed' message early in the morning, another attempt, and some hours of waiting and it finally seemed to be doing something, with the round 'progress' windows showing onscreen :) progress from here was much better, and after many restarts it concluded :)

Glad to know that you have come around the upgrade hurdle.

Cheers!

If you had downloaded the Windows 10 iso from the m$ site, extracted it's contents to a folder on your HD, then run the setup.exe file from that folder, the whole upgrade would probably have taken very little time. Depending on the hardware the whole upgrade normally didn't take much more than 2-4 hours on the PC's I ran the upgrade on. But if you do the upgrade via the icon in the taskbar, it takes much longer as it does a lot of testing etc to see if there is software or hardware installed that isn't compatible etc, and often that would fail after a long time because of such an issue.

Even when you use the ISO, you have to uncheck the online update check or it will take long.

Thank you for the very useful info,

Just thought ild post some progress, apologies for the pause (you can blame that on how long it takes to update to win10 !).  I did manage to make a system backup using paragon (although paragons first screen where it shows you the drives and partitions is a bit confusing), i managed to borrow a WD passport drive, and was surprised how quickly it managed to save the files (brings me on to a usb 3.0 question.. but later).

I then tried to update to win10, i got stuck on a screen that said something like 'downloading etc' but no other info apart from this.. when you are stuck for some hours you begin to wonder if anything is happening at all, or did it just get hung up somewhere ?? .. note to ms couldnt you warn people of just how long the update will take (like take a day out because your machine isnt going to be useable) , and also put up some messages to indicate that 'any' kind of progress is being made.. i could imagine some people pulling the plug or switching off/rebooting after some hours of nothing happening.. things did eventually progress and then seemed to transfer to windows update and popped a red cross message saying that the update had failed, this was about 2hrs before the free upgrade ends.. so i ended up leaving the machine on overnight, to return to another 'failed' message early in the morning, another attempt, and some hours of waiting and it finally seemed to be doing something, with the round 'progress' windows showing onscreen :) progress from here was much better, and after many restarts it concluded :)

Oh the usb3 question, how do you know if a pc's USB port supports the faster usb 3 ?

In Windows, the Device manager will tell you the USB port version.

PROPER hardware vendors will mark the USB port with BLUE plastic.
IMPROPER hardware vendors (mostly laptop manufacturers) might mark the USB port with standard black plastic, but provide small lettering "SS" (SuperSpeed) next to the port.

Oh the usb3 question, how do you know if a pc's USB port supports the faster usb 3 ?

Most usb3 ports are colored in blue from its outlook.

you can also see it from device manager, on a working system

Anything that is relatively new would have USB 3 ports. It will also be published on the manufacturer's website where you should be able to see the specs of the PC or mainboard. But many PC's have a mixture of USB2 and USB3 ports, so when you want to use the USB port of your PC make sure you use those that are blue (as has been mentioned, USB ports are colored blue). Also, Often OS installations won't work when you use the USB ports of a PC when booting from the installation media. So for that particular use you must often still use the USB2 (black) ports.