Updating an old computer to Win10 for free using a win7 key.

Analoguesat

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I do have an awful lot of really old hardware lying around so I may well see just how well win10 installs / runs on some of it over the winter. :D Im not planning to actually use any of this stuff - Im just curious. There are a couple of old Eeepc's in one of the filing cabinets in the office at work. Would it install & be usable on those??

(No we dont still use Eee pc's - but I never throw anything away that still works & might come in useful sometime!)
 

jeallen01

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"..There are a couple of old Eeepc's in one of the filing cabinets in the office at work. Would it install & be usable on those??"
I think that'll be a "definite maybe"!

I had an old ASUS 1225B (basically an Eeepc with an AMD E50 or E70 processor, IIRC) that I tried to update to W10 quite a few times in 2019, but the process almost completed most times and then failed and tried to roll back to W7 - but that process itself often failed and I then had a devil of a job to manually get it back to W7. I suspect that the problems lay with either the UEFI BIOS and/or the fact that it had an old HDD which meant it was very slow to deal with any online data coming from the Microsoft servers.

IIRC that was before the advent of the USB "mediacreator" approach, and so the latter might have worked because most of the setup is then "local" to the PC and with less interaction between that and the MS servers - but by the time that route became available the ASUS had physically fallen apart (the screen hinges failed!) and I binned it!
 

Analoguesat

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Ah - interesting comment about the hinge problem. Our first laptop (Asus) failed with jammed hinges which eventually split the lid..
 

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FWIW, since I really liked the keyboard on that ASUS 1225, I replaced it with a s/h Vivobook S200E that came fitted with a 256GB SSD (plenty big enough for "lounge use") and that has a totally different hinge design which, with 7 month's use, seems to be pretty sturdy. Also, since that has a dual core (albeit low power mobile) Pentium, then it's a lot faster, and I'm pretty happy with it.
 
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I tried that a few yrs ago. Had to call Microshit for advice and, sure they sorted it, connected via internet and the gud (in India) sorted all out for me
Try that, easy and they are often very friendly
 

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If anyone has been holding off upgrading due to the end of the free offer I would recommend doing it soon in case the activation servers are turned off. It really was a very painless procedure starting with a clean ssd on a self built computer. (No guarantees with updating an existing working system!)

Remember Win7 is nearly a year out of support now and getting increasingly vunerable. Other update paths are available - if you just want to update an old laptop so you can do a bit of web browsing then have a look at Linux Mint. I have that on an old laptop here - its perfectly functional for keeping an old laptop going and its basic functions are easy enough to pick up. For really old kit try Linux Peppermint.
Beware that Linux Mint (as is happening with many other Linux Distros) will not, from Mint 20 onwards, support 32 bit architecture. Mint 19 will, however, be supported until 2023.

I have a Linx 1010 which uses a 32bit Bootloader, but 64bit otherwise, and settled upon Fedora as it's one of the few remaining Distros that come with both 32bit and 64bit Bootloaders.
 

Channel Hopper

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I've been playing around with a reasonably new Dell laptop, in my terms (without CD rom, the cheapskates) that is running Ubuntu on the 128GB SSD, once the machine goes past the POST screen it is bloody fast.

Can't recall the full specification at the moment but the processor is an i5 of 1.9GHz performance with 8GB of RAM.
 
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