Making the move to Windows 10 from 7. Twin install question.

[Technique 41]

I currently have this setup.

 

Physical Drive 1: Win7 installed on it

Physical Drive 2: Win7 installed on it.

Partition of Physical Drive 2: storage for Drive 2 - pics, vids etc.

Physical Drive 3: Storage for physical drive 1.

 

Forget the why's and the why don't you just have different profiles on the same singular install for a second.

 

I've just been looking up some differences between Windows 7 & 10 to see if i can anticipate running in to any trouble before i end up jumping in with both feet. https://www.howtogeek.com/219034/here’s-what’s-different-about-windows-10-for-windows-7-users/

 

Particularly this bit:

 

Quote

 

When you set up Windows 10, the first thing you’ll be asked is whether you want to log into your Windows system with a Microsoft account. This is similar to logging into a Mac or iPhone with an Apple account, or a Chromebook or Android device with a Google account.

If you log in with a Microsoft account, many desktop settings (including your wallpaper) will sync between your PCs. You’ll be automatically logged into Microsoft services like the OneDrive client integrated into Windows. A Microsoft account is mandatory to use some of the new features, like the Windows Store.

If you don’t want to use a Microsoft account, that’s also fine — there’s a small little link that allows you to set up a traditional, local Windows account. You can easily convert it to a Microsoft account later, if you like.

 

 

I was looking at doing the same setup. Will this be possible or will i encounter problems with Windows 10?

 

Will the MS account be tied to the install/key? Meaning if Bill & Ben had their setup in Windows 7 working perfectly fine then only Bill could have his account tied to Windows 10, on BOTH drives? Or can both Bill & Ben have their own accounts tied to the install on each physical drive?

 

 

Again, let's not get in to the whys and why nots as it detracts from the question.

[mkol 90]

You need to ask your self questions,

 

1. How powerful is your CPU.

2. How much ram do you have in your system

3. How powerful is your GPU

4. How old is your motherboard.

 

I installed windows 10 pro on my 11 years old pc last week and this week I went back to windows 7 ultimate. From my experience Windows 10 uses lot more resources than Windows 7. The services come up to 156 after installing everything running that is in Windows 10 and in Windows 7 after tweaking the services comes to 36. So if your PC is brand new than SURE otherwise NO. I am speaking from experience of two to three times.

[Technique 41]

3 hours ago, mkol said:

You need to ask your self questions,

 

1. How powerful is your CPU.

2. How much ram do you have in your system

3. How powerful is your GPU

4. How old is your motherboard.

 

I installed windows 10 pro on my 11 years old pc last week and this week I went back to windows 7 ultimate. From my experience Windows 10 uses lot more resources than Windows 7. The services come up to 156 after installing everything running that is in Windows 10 and in Windows 7 after tweaking the services comes to 36. So if your PC is brand new than SURE otherwise NO. I am speaking from experience of two to three times.

PC is old (built in 2010) but i will answer your questions.

 

1) AMD Phenom 2 X6 1055T Processor 2.80GHz

2) 16GB

3) Not that powerful. Nvidia GeForce GTX 460 1GB

4) Built the PC in 2010 so at least that old.

 

A few months ago i used my old 60GB Crucial SSD drive to install Windows 10 on it and get a little look at it first hand. I didn't spend too long on it. Only 5-10 minutes really so not enough time to do anything serious. I just wanted to check that all the devices had their drivers installed 'from the off'. I heard Windows 10 was good at this but i wasn't convinced and wanted to see it for myself.

 

When Windows 10 fired up, sure enough all my drivers were installed.

 

I took this as my machine would be ok to run Windows 10, no?

 

 

I do a high level of banking on my PC. I have been advised numerous times to upgrade to Windows 10 for security reasons.

[Brandon H 3,639]

3 hours ago, mkol said:

I installed windows 10 pro on my 11 years old pc last week and this week I went back to windows 7 ultimate. From my experience Windows 10 uses lot more resources than Windows 7. The services come up to 156 after installing everything running that is in Windows 10 and in Windows 7 after tweaking the services comes to 36. So if your PC is brand new than SURE otherwise NO. I am speaking from experience of two to three times.

I've found this to be the exact opposite personally; even on older low end machines Windows 10 has run better than 7 for me due to better memory management and such.

[Steven P. 15,844]

4 hours ago, Technique said:

Particularly this bit:

I was looking at doing the same setup. Will this be possible or will i encounter problems with Windows 10?

 

Will the MS account be tied to the install/key? Meaning if Bill & Ben had their setup in Windows 7 working perfectly fine then only Bill could have his account tied to Windows 10, on BOTH drives? Or can both Bill & Ben have their own accounts tied to the install on each physical drive?

Again, let's not get in to the whys and why nots as it detracts from the question.

When you install Windows 10, yours will be the admin account, you can add another user no probs just like in Windows 7 only this time, the added Microsoft account will be able to sync their preferences on multiple devices.

 

[Technique 41]

Steven - just checking we are on the same page here.

 

I can only speak from Windows 7 experience with this but just to clarify, i am not talking about (within Windows 7 for the example):

 

Control Panel > User Accounts > Manage Another Account > Create a New Account.

 

Which is what i think you were talking about (though i say think as i'm not 100% sure)?

 

What i said in the opening post was what i currently have is let's say a Western Digital drive and a Samsung drive to simplify it completely (and forget all the storage drives).

 

Windows 7 is installed on both the WD and Samsung drives. It's a dual boot which 99.9% of the time would be different operating systems i imagine, but this is the same one.

 

So Bill boots to his Western Digital drive, Ben whenever he fires up the PC boots to the Samsung drive. Two totally different drives. Not user accounts but actual drives.

 

 

I was wondering if the need for a Microsoft account causes a problem with trying this exact same setup, but in Windows 10.

[aphanic 9]

Hi! Let's see if I got your setup correctly, you have a dual boot system in which the 2 OSes are Windows 7, right? Since it is the same machine we're talking about, do those installations use the same key or each has its own?

 

The reason I'm asking is because if they were using the same key, for example, because the machine came with Windows 7 preinstalled and you're using OEM activation, having 2 installations of Windows 10 in there could be just as easy as what you have now and wouldn't require Microsoft accounts for activation at all.

 

Performing an upgrade to Windows 10 using via the media creation tool still leads to a valid digital activation, meaning it converts the key you're using into a digital license stored in Microsoft's servers. So as long as you installed the same Windows 10 edition for the other boot option it will activate itself directly when connected to the Internet (and both would have different installation IDs). That digital license would be tied to the machine itself instead of a Microsoft account, so the usual rules apply regarding the changes you're allowed to do.

 

In any case, if you have 2 different keys for Windows 7 (or 10) I don't think there'd be any problem preventing you from replicating your current environment. In that case you may need to use Ben''s Microsoft account during 1 installation and link one key to it and Bill's for the other. I have had machines that had several independent installations in them, including several digital licenses just tied to the hardware (e.g. one for Windows 10 Home and another for Pro).

 

As for my experience with 10, especially these days, I tend to agree with @Brandon H. I still have around an old Dell Inspiron 1520 laptop (Core 2 Duo T9500, 4GB RAM, GeForce 8600M GT, SSD @ SATA II speeds) which should be from around 2007 and it works pretty good. The only problem for day to day work would be because of the slow hardware acceleration provided by the graphics card when browsing the net (ads don't help), being a laptop it's unavoidable. I think Meltdown and Spectre could play a part too, but their mitigations could be disabled if required. Still, yours being a desktop and way more powerful should have no trouble

[Technique 41]

10 hours ago, aphanic said:

Hi! Let's see if I got your setup correctly, you have a dual boot system in which the 2 OSes are Windows 7, right?

That is correct.

To take it further, they are the exact same Windows 7 ... Pro 64 bit

 

10 hours ago, aphanic said:

 

Since it is the same machine we're talking about, do those installations use the same key or each has its own?

They have the exact same key

10 hours ago, aphanic said:

 

The reason I'm asking is because if they were using the same key, for example, because the machine came with Windows 7 preinstalled

It didn't. I built the PC myself so i actually bought the Windows 7 disc.

10 hours ago, aphanic said:

 

and you're using OEM activation, having 2 installations of Windows 10 in there could be just as easy as what you have now and wouldn't require Microsoft accounts for activation at all.

I'll be honest with you ... i don't know what activation i'm using. I just installed Windows (7) from the disc and then once installed i went in to 'System' from within Control Panel and activated it.

I then rebooted the PC, accessed the 'other' hard drive on the dual boot screen and did the exact same Control Panel process to activate it on that hard drive too. A matter of minutes apart.

10 hours ago, aphanic said:

 

 So as long as you installed the same Windows 10 edition for the other boot option it will activate itself directly when connected to the Internet (and both would have different installation IDs). That digital license would be tied to the machine itself instead of a Microsoft account, so the usual rules apply regarding the changes you're allowed to do.

If i understand that properly then i am good to install Win10 to 2 separate hard drives that are attached to the same PC/motherboard/case on a dual boot setup and they will both activate just fine without issue?

10 hours ago, aphanic said:

 

In any case, if you have 2 different keys for Windows 7 (or 10) I don't think there'd be any problem preventing you from replicating your current environment.

I don't have 2 keys unfortunately. That'd surely make it nice and easy ... but costly. Twice the price no less. 

10 hours ago, aphanic said:

 

As for my experience with 10, especially these days, I tend to agree with @Brandon H. I still have around an old Dell Inspiron 1520 laptop (Core 2 Duo T9500, 4GB RAM, GeForce 8600M GT, SSD @ SATA II speeds) which should be from around 2007 and it works pretty good. The only problem for day to day work would be because of the slow hardware acceleration provided by the graphics card when browsing the net (ads don't help), being a laptop it's unavoidable. I think Meltdown and Spectre could play a part too, but their mitigations could be disabled if required. Still, yours being a desktop and way more powerful should have no trouble

Thank you. As i say, i did do a dummy test run and it seemed to be ok. I've read of people with older and slower machines than mine who have said it's fine on theirs.

 

I don't do any mass video editing or hardcore gaming.

 

I will possibly be doing video compressing for Plex but that will be at a later date if/when i build/buy a new system because it takes too long on this system.

[mkol 90]

Memory is fine and the cpu is fine but with that graphic card it will be slow on your system and you won't be able to run high resolution display on it is well. I am happy with Windows 7 and I don't care if it's out of support as I am behind router hardware firewall and software firewall which are up to date. Also I have other utilities installed to protect me from spyware and so on. If you feel happy with Windows 10 than go for it but with that graphic card I wouldn't go for it. Also the DPI are not very clear on Windows 10 I mean the fonts are not sharper as Windows 7.

[SnoopZ 306]

20 minutes ago, mkol said:

Memory is fine and the cpu is fine but with that graphic card it will be slow on your system and you won't be able to run high resolution display on it is well. I am happy with Windows 7 and I don't care if it's out of support as I am behind router hardware firewall and software firewall which are up to date. Also I have other utilities installed to protect me from spyware and so on. If you feel happy with Windows 10 than go for it but with that graphic card I wouldn't go for it. Also the DPI are not very clear on Windows 10 I mean the fonts are not sharper as Windows 7.

So are you saying he can't run Windows 10 with a Nvidia Geforce GTX 460 reliably? As i run Windows 10 without any issue at all and i only have Intel 4400 graphics, apologies if i have misunderstood your posts. 

[mkol 90]

It won't run smoothly as I have tried with old machines on three different systems with quite similar graphic card specs. It will run but not smoothly.

[SnoopZ 306]

6 minutes ago, mkol said:

It won't run smoothly as I have tried with old machines on three different systems with quite similar graphic card specs. It will run but not smoothly.

Well no issues here and as others have said no issues for them on their systems either, so maybe you should not be so ready to put someone off installing 10 as it looks like you're  the only one having issues.

[mkol 90]

I am not putting anyone else off I am giving honest opinion. If he is happy with Windows 10 than go for it. I am just sharing my experience. 

[Riggers 203]

With regards to the same key on 2 different drives (whereby the drive is the only difference) you should be fine. I have a similar situation, windows 10 on 2 different hard drives in the same tower booting seperately (I unplug one) both installed with the same key and no problems so far...

 

Good luck.

[Technique 41]

@Riggers - top man. Thanks for that clarification.

 

To others, don't get in to a back and forth with mkol. He/she is entitled to their opinion. From what i have read, i agree - their opinion will be in the minority, but they're still entitled to it.

 

From what i've read, my machine exceeds the requirements for Windows 10 quite comfortably and my dummy run indicated that also, although granted - i didn't give it any serious use to know for sure. I think it's worth a punt though.

 

With the amount of finance handling i do for the amount of people i do it for, it would probably be foolish to not run Windows 10.

 

Even though i don't think it's a patch on Windows 7. For me Windows 7 was the ideal OS. Looks a million times better than 10 but that's my own opinion. I'm sure there's even some people out there who thought 8 looked nice. 🤣

[SnoopZ 306]

Mkol was stating it as fact he didn't  say it was his opinion.

 

Anyway back on topic, I hope you wont have any issues with 10.

 

 

[Technique 41]

Lucky for me then that i never swallow the first answer i'm given. I always like to hear numerous feedback 😉