Recently I installed the final version of the Windows 10 Technical Preview, which is practically identical to the final release (which comes out on the 29th). I didn’t want to mess around with it too much, since my PC doesn’t have a DVD drive and I can’t find my 8 GB flash drive anywhere, so my only option was to upgrade from Windows 7.

I started by downloading the latest Windows 10 build via torrent, since the image file was no longer available on the Insider site, but I got eager and wanted to install it no matter what. The image file downloaded fine, I mounted it to a virtual drive with Daemon Tools. The upgrade started, asked if I wanted to delete everything or keep my personal files. I decided to keep my personal things, since I hadn’t upgraded Windows this way before. The installer started copying files, then restarted, and the system was upgraded in about 15 minutes.

Programs that weren’t installed on the C drive were preserved, while I had to reinstall the rest. The only problem I ran into was the missing Directx, otherwise everything worked perfectly fine, only the video card driver was missing (I’m talking about nVidia — the system recognized the card by default, but the official driver is still better).