Windows 10 Tech Preview, I am done for now.......

..... must be the HP computer I have no idea. I was excited when I first test W10TP on a virtual machine. I love the look and feel. I installed the W10TP on VMWare and even modified it to use Hyper-V. I only had one hard drive so a VM was my only choice. I did not however installed the other goodies that I already had on my Windows 7 machine. I played around with the app store, like the idea of using apps to access LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter without using the browser. Since I have Xfinity internet, I love the ESPN app to watch some games. I also downloaded Visual Studio Community to work on making some Windows 8.1/10 apps. All fine and dandy.

Then it happen......

I fired up the Windows phone emulator inside the VMWare and poof... the dreaded BSOD. Scared me. Rebooted and uninstalled the VMWare and deleted the virtual W10TP and left it alone, that is, until I bought another hard drive.

I finally bought another hard drive.....

Microsoft is claiming an in place upgrade for Windows 7 users.... May work in the final build, but not now, well, at least on my machine. My machine is only 5 years old. Here is how I know. With the new hdd, Armed with the latest version from Microsoft (9926 I think), I tried to install a fresh copy on the new hdd. After several hours upon several hours of waiting for the installation, the "windows cannot finish the installation on this machine's configuration" message.

Bummer....

Then I noticed that the BIOS was reading less memory than what I had, even though Windows 7 had been reading the correct amount. Great. Switched the memory to another bank and the same thing. OK, remove the offending stick and retry. After several hours upon several hours, again, same message. OK, maybe it's an HP thing, or maybe a bad hdd. New ones can be bad too. New hdd checked out good, the original had a bad sector. OK, clone the old to the new (the old on had been running continuously for almost 43000 hours. That's almost 5 years if you do the math. Three bad sectors after countless crashes and yes I am brutal, that is not bad). Good, the bad sectors did not follow, and since I know the bad sectors is not a problem, I wanted to try in an in place upgrade.

So I tried from the Windows update. No dice. Kept going back to the screen to choose what you want to keep. OK, so that didn't work, I decided to use the cd burned copy. After several hours upon several hours, the bad configuration prompt happened again, but this time, I brought up the command prompt and was able to get booted, until I clicked out of the prompt and then I was brought to a repair screen.

I decided to go with refresh.....

This does not work because the idea of an in place upgrade is to keep ALL of your files and settings. The refresh mode is the same as upgrading to Windows 8.1, you only get to keep your files and saved work, but your programs you will have to re-install. I can live with that, for now. This is by all means a cloned disk. And yes, I had cloned the disk a few times and retried all the processes.The refresh did work, but it was a mess. Slow, wrong drivers were used or not used, even after I re-installed them. UGH!!!!!

I decided to try one more time, and the error this time, said there was too many restarts. BTW, I had my main hdd unplugged so not to contaminate the boot loader. I just used the BIOS to switch the OS booting when I was able to get W10TP running. Windows 7 wanted to do a file check on the hdd with the W10TP.

And just before I wrote this, I tried again, both as an upgrade and fresh install, with the older build 9841.

I think I will wait to try again later, when 10041 is available (or ever will be) in iso form....

Back to VMware I think.....