Need To Clear Drive Before Installing Windows Again?
Nov 26, 2015
The title pretty much sums it. I'm having some issues with my PC, (not bad, resolved easily from just a clean install) and i'm going to use the windows media creation tool to do a fresh install of windows on my drive. Now my PC came with windows 8.1 pre-installed, but since i HAVE upgraded to windows 10 already, it won't download windows 8.1 right? Also, since i already have windows and everything working on this drive, will i need to do a factory restore before using the media creation tool, or does it clear everything on the drive anyway when i use the creation tool?
I'm interested in the W10 free upgrade from a usb ISO image. I now have W7.
A couple of questions concerning the W10 installation from a bootable usb ISO image - will the hard drive require prior repartitioning, and what do I do when the install process asks for the license key ? AS I recall, installing W7 without a key only allowed 30 days of use.
I have Windows 7 pro installed and then upgraded to windows 10 with latest updates etc for it. it is installed on C drive like normal. i have another hard drive G that i use to install bunch of PC games ranging from new to old. I noticed that when some of the pc games want to install Direct X componets, MS .net redistro packs etc an error occurs saying i do not have Admin rights to do this. I know Win10 comes with Directx 11 and that the pc games have direct X 10 so i do not need that updated every time a game asks same goes with the redistro packs for .net and other comparable components do i need to install these components everytime i install a game? why am i getting an error in which i have to be an admin when i already am in the admin group.
1. Have a business machine with Windows 7 Ultimate.
2. Just built a bigger, faster machine to replace my older business machine.
I do not want to upgrade my current business machine to Windows 10.
3. I want to install Windows 10 on my new bigger, faster machine before I start installing all my business apps onto it and testing it before retiring my current machine.
My new machine has a blank SSD drive without any OS on it.
I own a few Windows 7 licenses in Home, Pro, and the one Ultimate currently used.
Do I have to install Windows 7 first on my new machine in order to get Windows 10 on it, or is it possible to put Windows 10 upgrade on it directly, bypassing a Win 7 install?
And if possible, how do I deal with the licensing? I have the Win 7 licenses, can they convert?
I decided I will make my notebook laptop into a gaming PC. Before you think; Laptop.. Gaming PC? It is a beast of a laptop and it has beaten many desktops at video games, applications ect. One of the main problems I have with this laptop is that it is amazing but when it gets to a certain point it just stops performing as well as it should, I checked task manager and the Ram was pretty low, the CPU was pretty low, the Ethernet connection was fine but the Hard Disk Performance is sky high (Even when I am doing totally nothing. Bearing in mind the read speed was 6.5mb/s and the Write speed was going under 135Kb/s (135Kb Max). So I decided I needed to get an SSD but how to install one or transfer my laptop data to an SSD.
I have an HP Stream 7 that only has 32 GB of space. I put in an SD card and changed the default location in "Storage" to install all new apps to the SD card. Whenever I try to install an app now, I get an error and will not install. When I changed it back to install on C, it downloads and works fine. Is there any work arounds? I saw that someone mentioned they installed the apps to C, and then moved them to the SD card.
When I got my computer in 2012, I used Windows' own mover to move all files and settings over. I didn't know that that was a bad idea, and so ended up with a corrupted profile and some bad settings.
I am finally ready to do something about it.
Here's my setup:
* Windows 10 (which I am loving, by the way) * Two drives, C and D. C is my boot drive.
I want to format a new SSD drive with a clean Windows 10 install and then replace my existing C drive with that new drive. I know this means I will have to reinstall everything that is on my existing C drive, but I'm fine with that.
Here are my questions:
1. How can I format my new SSD drive with Windows 10 and get it set up as my new C drive? I have a USB connector for the new SSD drive so I can access it from a USB port first; can I use that connection to install Windows on the drive? The new SSD came with software to clone my existing C drive, but of course that is not what I want; I want a clean install to get away from the corrupted install. Can Windows recognize and format a drive connected through a USB port?
2. When I put my new drive C into my computer, how do I tell my computer that I want that to be my boot drive?
3. Once I get the new SSD installed as my new drive C, how do I format my old drive C as a drive E with Windows 10? Again, I am fine with wiping out everything on that drive once I have a new C.
4. I have a lot of programs installed on my D drive and want to keep them there. Will I need to reinstall them? (Again, if so, I'm fine with that.) Or would symlinks work?
I currently have windows 7 on my 1TB hard drive and have recently bought a new 256gb Crucial SSD (but not installed it in my desktop yet).
I bought the SSD to be able to install games onto it so they load quicker but also if possible to have my OS booting from it so my computer loads quicker from switching on.
Someone put me onto the idea of using a program called Steam Mover to be able to move games from my HDD to the SSD without having to uninstall them and then re-download them direct to the SSD. I understand this can also be used for other programs like photoshop etc too.
I want to upgrade to Windows 10 but don't want to have to do a clean install and lose all the programs that i currently have installed such as Photoshop, Office, iTunes etc. Is it possible to somehow upgrade my OS on my HDD but then actually boot from the SSD perhaps by using the Steam Mover program?
If not, do I just have to bite the bullet and accept that I will either lose or have to reinstall a number of programs to my HDD? I do have a second 1TB HDD which is empty at the moment in case its needed for cloning files?
I've been looking into clearing the pagefile, and I found the following steps at a somewhat dated webpage:
In the registry editor, navigate to: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetControlSession ManagerMemory ManagementSet ClearPageFileAtShutdown to the REG_DWORD value of 1.Restart Windows.
I'm just wondering whether those steps are still valid, and, if so, does clearing the pagefile work as advertised?
When I first upgraded to Win 10 I had no problem but now outgoing messages stay in my Outbox for absolutely ages. I have recently gone to fibre broadband and have no problems receiving emails.
I had two accounts on this pc when i was running windows 7 i had videos i bought saved on desktop on that account now it's gone i only have one account now and i cannot find the videos even tho the memory is being used up. How do i find those videos?
I would like to clear my Reliability history after doing some program testing that generated a lot of errors. I cleared out all of the Event logs, but a number of errors are still showing in the Reliability history.
There was a tutorial in the Windows 7 forums as well as a similar Win 7 solution with a batch file at the Windows Club.
It appears that the files used to be stored in the ProgramdataMicrosoftRAC folder, which doesn't seem to exist for Windows 10.
make the "Clear All Event Viewer Logs using a BAT file" self starting such as making it run automatically on a daily basis or show me what code I would need to add to it to do that for me. I would just love to clear out the 10016s and 7031s codes daily.
When I was running Windows 7, my system had a small solid state C drive that did not have enough space for windows 10 upgrade. I got a larger 2TB regular hard disk and used the manufacturer's software to clone the old Windows-7 SSD C drive to the new 2TB and then upgraded to Windows 10.
Now under windows 10, when go into defrag, the C Drive shows as a Solid State drive and of course windows does not want to optimize it.
The new drive definitely is not SSD. I assume somehow that setting was cloned from the old disk.
Is there either a way to change the C drive to a regular "hard disk drive" or force windows to defrag what it thinks is a SSD?
Windows 10 keeps installing the ASUS Smart Gesture touchpad driver on my laptop. The driver is garbage and it runs three memory resident processes, which seems rather excessive for a touchpad driver. The default Windows touchpad driver works perfectly well, so I want to use that instead of the ASUS driver. However, if I uninstall the ASUS driver Windows Update quickly reinstalls it.
I disabled automatic driver installation when I installed Windows 10, as you can see here:
Despite that Windows update keeps installing the ASUS Smart Gesture driver.
Can I stop windows(10) from automatically installing drivers for my Radeon graphics card? I have an HP dv6 with switchable graphics and I only want to have the Intel HD 3000 graphics working because whenever I install the drivers for the Radeon graphics the laptop will not boot into windows on the next reboot.I have uninstalled the drivers but it keeps re-installing it and the screen flickers every time it installs it.
After win10 installation icons of differnet apps are not clear,they are blur... even text is not clear.... graphical object on different apps are giving stare case affects ....
Windows 10 Pro and I am having an issue with my Touchpad driver, it seems to want to mess up and not move to where I need it to go, so I uninstalled it from the Programs and Features menu, but my issue is it keeps popping back up in Windows Update and installing on its own, I don't want the driver for it as it doesn't function correctly with it installed it works great when its not installed so how can I hide it
I am using a HP laptop (Probook 4530s) and I want a completely fresh install removing all there little annoying partitions and applications. I would just refresh but I am wondering if that would work, as the bios is liked to HP softwareWhat would happen with the bios?
I currently have a PC that is running Windows 8.1. I have a 120GB SSD as the primary drive ( C: ) with the OS and a few programs installed on it. I also have a 750GB HDD ( D: ) installed in the computer. Over the past year and a half, I've installed some programs to the SSD and some to a folder on the HDD. I plan on updating this computer to Windows 10. To do that though, I was planning on wiping the SSD and doing a fresh install to it and just reinstalling any programs. My question is if there will be any issues regarding the programs installed on the HDD. I'm guessing some of them probably still have certain files installed on the SSD and that wiping it will mess up those programs.
I'm also wondering what a good way of installing programs to a secondary drive is for the future. I'd like to install some programs to the secondary drive without worrying about certain files still existing on the SSD while still being able to install some programs to the SSD itself. This way if updating in the future, I wouldn't have to worry about this issue. Let me know if this makes sense and if I need to clarify something.
