[sharkbite]

Hi Russel...

My experience upgrading all my machines has been nothing but pleasure.
They are all running much better than any of the xp or win7 builds i have run. The oldest was a e6750 dual core i built in 2005 which has seen all 3 o/s.

I have not yet had to rebuild any w10 build from scratch due to performance issues (never bothered with w7) but with xp i has to do a yearly teardown 3 time before i spat the dummy and upgraded it to 7.

The other pc is a phenomII x6 which has never exactly run like a dog, but
is positively sprightly under w10.

the last is an ARM dual core lappie that was useless for anything except browsing, but the upgrade saw me able to use it as a capture device for astrophotography.

last month The e6750 build blew a motherboard after 11 years of faithful service.
I put in a modern heart and lungs, and rebuilt from scratch with w10 64bit.
This kind of surgery will give you an un-activated build BUT
I used the w7 product key and it was accepted.
(this is not necessary when upgrading the HDD)

I now have 3 machines that are a w10 64bit, and the last time i paid for an o/s was in 2009. They all run beautifully.
This, in my view is an absolute bargain.

All my astro apps work, video capture works via a 10yo capture card,
and all just that little bit snappier

The single problem i had was that the IRDA stack was removed a few builds ago, which meant that i could no longer talk to my dive computer.
Through much user bleating this has now been re-instated with a better one.....all good!

As others have stated - depending on the age of your lappie an upgrade might be problematic if there are no drivers for it, or indeed for any
special equipment you might attach (e.g. usb cameras)
I don't know this for sure, but it may be a problem.
If the lappie is not up to snuff the upgrade process will halt and warn you anyway.

here's one that might stuff you -

w10 drops the media centre feature -

if you are using w8 MCE you need to have a good think about proceeding,
as you will need to replace the MCE function with an app.

cheers,

P.S. if you need more oomph out of the lappie - have you considered an upgrade to SSD? I found this to be the best bang for buck boost and run them in all machines now.
everything that needs a fast disk is quicker - faster boot times - faster app starts (except video processing which is not as disk intensive as you might think)- and you don't really need more RAM as caching to SSD is "almost" as quick....