This won’t take long

(only your weekend)

After numerous installs since the Windows 3.11 era I should have known better and not tried the upgrade from Windows 7 to 10. But I do not have a spare machine for a clean install and therefore when the popup assured me that I could upgrade the laptop, I broke my rule:

You never change (upgrade or downgrade) the operating system that came with your laptop. If you do, at least make sure you have a spare machine to do actual work.

That is because laptops come with hardware that is not necessarily recognised by anything else other than drivers supplied by the manufacturer. So if you do change the OS, or even install a “clean” version of it (without all the bloatware that manufacturers package with it) be prepared for stuff not working. Yes, that fingerprint sensor, that 3G modem, the winmodem in the old days and before the linuxant drivers for example.

So anyway I felt brave and went along and tried it. It seemed to go fine. But at 76% the process stalled. And then it failed with DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE. Following the suggestion of a friend, I tried the online downloading tool that Microsoft gives to download and / or start the upgrade. It failed to even start. I run it again and built an ISO DVD to have around just in case. But still I was facing the same problem.

I gave it some thought after browsing the Net for a bit and thought that it could be the speed setting switch which I almost always have set to “stamina” and not “speed”. Again at 76% the procedure stalled like forever. I shut down the machine and when I powered it up again the procedure continued. And finished. Yes!

So I browsed around to get a feeling of the system. And then Skype was not working. Fair I thought since my login account was not linked to a Hotmail.com account and maybe after the upgrade this is a mandatory requirement. In the mean time OneDrive installed and update. So let’s reboot and see what happens. And it never rebooted. It stuck on the Windows 10 logo with the balls doing their circles.

So I shut down the machine again. I power it on and it is OK. I backup my data, shut down the VAIO and press the magic “assist” button. Windows 7 with all the bloat that Sony has chosen gets installed on the machine again. About 1h later I start uninstalling stuff. Adobe, McAfee, Office (Trial), SQL Server, Norton go by. SP1 gets installed. 214 updates after SP1 too.

Like the upgrade procedure said: This won’t take long