Upgrading to Windows 10
I didn’t like the Windows 10 preview, I thought it was a pain in the backside, so I have delayed upgrading from Windows 7 until the last minute when I got the countdown notification. I have been running a slightly dodgy copy of Windows 7 for a long time, so I was somewhat surprised when, out of the goodness of their hearts, Microsoft said I could have an activated copy of Windows 10 for free.
So, to check it out, I copied my working system to an old spare 160Gb drive, using the MiniTool Partition Wizard. There is a Migrate OS to HD/SSD wizard which just worked. Having done that and checked it worked ok, I then ran the upgrade, which was painfully slow. However once it had finished the system worked fine, albeit slowly due to the old disk drive.
So I ran the Windows 10 upgrade on the original system, which ran quite quickly in comparison, as the system disk is an SSD. I was able to get rid of most of the redundant garbage in the start menu relatively easily. Most of it can be just uninstalled. Getting rid of One Drive is a bit devious, you have to do a right click on the Start menu item, choose Open File Location, then do it again, then delete OneDrive.exe, backtrack and delete the One Drive link. It will then be gone from the Start menu.
I wiped my spare disk and did a clean install of Windows 10 after the free update offer ran out to check the activation was still valid, which it was, and that the installation included drivers for my config, which it did, except for the display. Driver updates were subsequently installed by the update system. The install and update ran reasonably quickly considering the slow disk.