How should I upgrade to Windows 10? XPS 15 (9530)

Hello guys,

I bought a Dell XPS 15 about a year ago from the USA. I'm not here in India and Windows 10 has come out. I'm just wondering what's the best way to do it.

1. Clean install: Clean install Windows 10 and then download all the drivers necessary? (is there one consolidated list somewhere)?

2. Upgrade: Do an upgrade and hoping that all is well with the laptop?

3. Some other way?

Thanks,
Crazysah

 

Well, no matter what, you'll need to do an upgrade installation first. The reason is because you don't have a Windows 10 product key. So you will need to do an upgrade frm Windows7/ 8.1 to generate a valid Windows 10 product key, and then extract it l

Go to the windows 10 download site to download the installation utility. That utility will automatically download the ISO for you, and burn it to a DVD or USB flash drive.

Once that is done, run setup.exe from your newly created Windows 10 media from within Windows 7/8.1. Let the upgrade happen. And when its done, be sure to extract your Windows 10 product key.

It's a pretty painless process. It took me about 45 minutes.

Once that is done, you have a working Windows 10 system, with all of your apps and settings preserved. It is up to you whether you want to do a clean install from here, or whether you just want to use your upgrade installation. Personally, I just used my upgrade installation. Between modern fast cpus, high amounts of RAM, and SSDs, I really don't think you're going to notice any real world performance improvement by doing a clean install (except for the incredible pain in the rear it is to rebuild a computer from scratch).

 

ignore the part about the product key as the clean install allows you to skip the product key, it pulls this form the activation server when you get online and does it all for you.

Clean install after upgrading, this stops a lot of problems. It will pull most drivers but not the MEI and chipset, they are on Dells site for win10, Windows update pulls down a newer trackpad driver that works well but the sound drivers it pulls down need downgrading to the win10 ones on dells site.

That's about it.

 

First I did a clean install win 10 on my XPS 15 on a new partition. 'CLWin' 10 detected the win 8.1 partition and the choice for dual boot was automatically generated by the CLWin 10 clean installation. The installation asked for, but I could not enter a license key, since I did not have it (it's embedded in the BIOS according to Dell). The extracted win 8.1 key was invalid (message: does not work).
Waited for 3 weeks for a valid automatic CLWin 10 activation, as Dell suggested, it did not happen. A second call to Dell support said: activation of clean installs will not happen, only upgrades of older win's will activate win 10.

Then I decided to do an upgrade win 10 install of the win 8.1 partition. Also flawlessly and it did NOT ask for a license key key this time. Dual boot now indicated/displayed a Win 10 on partition x and Win10 on partition y. Chose to boot the UpWin10 and noticed that UpWin10 was automatically activated right form the first boot.
Then booted the 'old' clean installed CLWin 10 partition, and mysteriously, it was also activated. Both win 10's had the same license key.

Now, one difference is that UpWin10 seems much slower than the clean installed CLWin 10. Starting up takes 1-2 minutes against some 30 seconds of the clean one. The UpWin10 has all Win 8.1 installed software still installed. The clean CLWin 10 has not, of course. Also there seems to be an issue with the SSD, the CLWin 10 just uses it as cache, but is very fast especially when getting out of various sleep modes. And there is no mentioning when booting of Intel fast start on CLwin 10, may be it's hidden/automatic.

 

So, I did more research on what exactly happens with Win10 product keys (upgrade or clean install).

1) When you upgrade 7, 8.0, or 8.1 to Win 10, it generates a new product key for your copy of Windows 10.
2) Your Windows 10 product key is associated with a "fingerprint" based on a combination of unique ID's in your hardware configuration (much like a Windows 7 OEM license key).
3) If you do a clean install of Windows 10 AFTER an upgrade, then Microsoft Activation will recognize the "fingerprint" of your machine, and automatically activate your copy of Windows 10 for you. This works because your hardware configuration has not changed.

This is why you experienced the behavior you did:
- Clean install of Windows 10 did not activate (since you installed it BEFORE you performed an upgrade of 8.1 --> 10)
- Upgrade install of Windows 10 activated immediately, as it should.
- Clean install of Windows 10 activated AFTER you did an upgrade (since your hardware "fingerprint" is now registered on the Windows Activation servers).

 

Indeed, I also read about a fingerprint/machine profile that Microsoft stores on it servers, in stead of the license key only. That new(?) way will even influence upgrades of for example the disk drive, which I will do in the near future (all SSD). Microsoft even claims that the license is bound to the hardware it is sold on. So a license will not be valid on a new motherboard.
I did not read anything about the BIOS embedded license, that started with win 8 I believe. Nothing about what exactly is stored and whether that method is now replaced by a stored server profile.

Any explanation for the difference in performance in my case?