Update to Windows 10

Final version of Windows 10 is in global availability. But the update is released in waves, so some of you may not see the update and some of you may have problems with updating to Windows 10.

Because of the waves of update, you may not see the update even if you registered for the update earlier. You need to wait for days or weeks until the update will be delivered to your computer. Some of you may see some errors when trying to update to Windows 10. But Microsoft has released great tool Windows 10 Download Tool, which allows to upgrade your computer directly without waiting for the automatic update. Using this tool you can also create an installation media (DVD or flash drive) or just download an ISO.

It’s important to note that the first upgrade to Windows 10 has to be upgrade, not clean install, because you need to transform your old license (Windows 7 or Windows 8.1) to a new Windows 10 license. If you do a clean install, your Windows 10 will not be activated and you will have no option how to activate them.

So if you do the upgrade, in the first step choose upgrade of this computer and then will be the image downloaded and verified.

If you want to create an installation media, after the steps described above will be created the medium and verified the medium. After that the toll will check for updates and download the updates and then you will have the choice how to install the new system. Here you can’t choose the clean install because of the activation.

After you start the upgrade, your computer will be restarted several times and after few tens of minutes the upgrade will be done and you will have Windows 10 in the same edition as you had your old Windows. And because now your Windows are activated and the activation is sent to Microsoft activation server, you can do a clean install of Windows 10.

If you want to do a clean install, the best way is to create an installation flash drive using the mentioned tool. Then you can boot from the flash drive and do the clean install. It’s important to choose the same edition as you had before. And I recommend to remove all disk partitions. In a last part of the installation process you are asked for activation key. But you can skip this step, because your Windows had been activated before and after the installation you should see that the activation was successful.