How to upgrade to Windows 10 using included disk

[johne262]

Which method is recommended to use when upgrading a new HP PC from Windows 7 to 10 with the included disk? Running the upgrade from within windows 7 or booting the PC from the Windows 10 disk?

[WAWood]

@johne262

If this disk was included with the PC when you bought it, then it is an HP Upgrade disk -- and for that, you insert it into the optical drive.

You should then see a small window open with a dark blue background indicating is it preparing, and after that, you have to accept the terms of the upgrade, and it will upgrade to Win10.

However, BEFORE you do that, I would strongly suggest that you do an image backup of your PC using a third-party tool.

I personally prefer to use third-party Recovery solutions as they tend to be both more flexible and more reliable than any built-in solutions.

Macrium Reflect (MR) provides a FREE version that can be used to image and restore partitions or entire drives: http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.aspx

What I recommend is the following:
1) Download and install Macrium Reflect (MR)
2) Run MR and choose the option: "Create an image of the partition(s) required to backup and restore Windows" to write a full backup to an external drive or USB stick
3) Use the option to create a boot USB stick or CD

My experience is that MR, when using the High Compression option, typically can compress the saved image file to about 50% of the USED space in the OS partition. This means if you have an 80GB OS partition, and 40GB is used, MR only needs about 20GB to store the image file.

I use this all the time and it typically takes less than 10 minutes to do the image backup and about the same time or less to do a restore.

Plus, MR has the option to Add a Recovery Boot Menu entry. This allows you then to boot into WinRE, and you can then use that to do a restore -- when you can't boot into Windows!

NOW, you have the means to restore a full working system from the external drive or USB stick in only a few minutes.

Good Luck