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To Upgrade or Fresh Install?

Harry Voyager

So, going to be replacing the GPU, and deciding it's probably time to get onboard with Windows 11, but really torn between doing a fresh install vs doing the upgrade vs putting it off for another couple of years while Windows 10 is still supported. 

 

I'm going to have to do it eventually, but I've got a list of something like 20+ programs and tools I'm going to need to reinstall to get everything back up to where it is now, and I'm just not looking forward to the process at all. 

 

On the otherhand, I'm given to understand the upgrade installs tend to be less stable and have not much guarantee of things working afterwards as is. 

 

I kind of just don't really want to deal with it, to be honest.

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Upgrade. If you encounter problems, you can always reinstall. Most of the systems we've upgraded from 7/8/8.1 to 10 work(ed) just fine as well as the ones we upgraded from 10 to 11. Taking about me, my friends and my work colleagues.

M.S.C.E. (M.Sc. Computer Engineering), Senior IT advisor in a hospital, 30 years of gaming, 20 years of computer enthusiasm, Geek, Trekkie, anime fan

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upgrading your GPU is a 20 minute process.

 

upgrading windows 10 to 11 i sosmewhere between a 30 minute and 30 day process, depending on how badily things go wrong. (when i upgraded 8.1 to 10, i ended up with windows 10 running on an 8.1 kernel underneath.. literally weeks of troubleshooting 'fun' before i realised that..)

 

reinstalling takes an afternoon, if you're well prepared. but.. it's a matter of being prepared.

 

but really.. if you dont want to bother.. keep on the win10 train, it's still fine here, as long as it's not EOL there really isnt much reason to abandon ship.

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1 hour ago, manikyath said:

upgrading your GPU is a 20 minute process.

maybe less

 

1 hour ago, manikyath said:

upgrading windows 10 to 11 i sosmewhere between a 30 minute and 30 day process, depending on how badily things go wrong. (when i upgraded 8.1 to 10, i ended up with windows 10 running on an 8.1 kernel underneath.. literally weeks of troubleshooting 'fun' before i realised that..)

or longer  hahahaha (3 years and newer hardware )

 

 

current main system: as of 1st Jan 2023

motherboard : Gigabyte B450M DS3H V2

CPU: Ryzen 5 3600

ram : 16Gig Corsair Vengeance 3600mhz

OS :multi-boot

Video Card : RX 550 4 GIG

Monitor: BENQ 21 inch

 

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20 hours ago, OhioYJ said:

20 Programs? That's nothing. Personally I always go the fresh install route. I don't want any hassles to deal with. My vote is "rip the band aid off" and get it over with.

 

That's just to get basic functionality and DCS running. I'm not counting the steam drive, mostly, on the assumption I'll just redownload games as I feel like playing them.

 

Yes, I need a checklist to turn DCS on... 

 

19 hours ago, manikyath said:

upgrading your GPU is a 20 minute process.

 

upgrading windows 10 to 11 i sosmewhere between a 30 minute and 30 day process, depending on how badily things go wrong. (when i upgraded 8.1 to 10, i ended up with windows 10 running on an 8.1 kernel underneath.. literally weeks of troubleshooting 'fun' before i realised that..)

 

reinstalling takes an afternoon, if you're well prepared. but.. it's a matter of being prepared.

 

but really.. if you dont want to bother.. keep on the win10 train, it's still fine here, as long as it's not EOL there really isnt much reason to abandon ship.

The prepared part is the bugbear. I think I've got everything listed that I need, but it always seems like there's some silly thing I've forgotten, or some obscure configuration parameter I've missed somewhere, and then it's ages and a half to refund whatever caused the original problem and get it fixed, again. 

 

That said, I did want to do some experimenting with AI, which I'm advised means I mead a Linux boot. I've got a spare SSD, and some spare SATA port, so nuclear option sounds like the best bet to get a stable dual boot going. 

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43 minutes ago, Harry Voyager said:

 I'm not counting the steam drive, mostly, on the assumption I'll just redownload games as I feel like playing them.

You're making your life difficult (in my opinion) if your Steam library isn't on a separate drive or partition. It's so nice to just reinstall Steam point it to the library folder and all your games are installed again. You can move game files to a different drive if you want before doing this? It would prevent needing to redownload?

 

I have made a script that backs up the config files and save game files for games that aren't cloud based that backs them up to the same drive. Then can restore those files in situation like this. 

 

Steam makes things so easy. 

 

 

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3 hours ago, OhioYJ said:

You're making your life difficult (in my opinion) if your Steam library isn't on a separate drive or partition. It's so nice to just reinstall Steam point it to the library folder and all your games are installed again. You can move game files to a different drive if you want before doing this? It would prevent needing to redownload?

 

I have made a script that backs up the config files and save game files for games that aren't cloud based that backs them up to the same drive. Then can restore those files in situation like this. 

 

Steam makes things so easy. 

 

 

Wait, that works now?

 

The last time I tried to migrate a Steam library or rather massively failed. 

 

I've got the whole thing sitting on a big, separate QVO drive, and if all I need to do is install Steam and point? That would be rather nice. There are some parts I'll need to fresh install: all the VR interface stuff, but that will massively reduce the re-downloading I need to do. 

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6 minutes ago, Harry Voyager said:

Wait, that works now?

It's always worked? Well for as long as I've been using Steam. Every new build I do, fresh install. My Steam Library is mirrored across to drives in my PC (in case one were to fail), and I've upgraded those drives as my library has grown (Steam has never noticed as I've swapped out those drives over the years). I also back up my Steam library folder to my NAS. My Steam Library folder currently sits on a 22 TB WD Gold drive. I use this same setup in my son's PC, though slightly smaller drives.

 

If you wipe out Windows, you re-install Steam. Then point it to the library folder. It will detect the games installed in that directory, and all is good. Upon launching the games, somethings on the Windows side may have to be reinstalled like runtimes, or directx, but Steam will do that automatically for you (but those are the small things). It's 100 GB games that I want to try and avoid re-downloading.

 

Like I mentioned above though, beware that games that don't have cloud saves, store save game files on the C: drive, regardless of where the SteamLibrary folder is (unfortunately) So these files you will want to backup if you care about these saves. In many cases they will have configs, and in some games, custom skins you may have loaded things like that.

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@OhioYJ Do you know if that works with MS store games too? Or is that to much of an over embedded fluster cluck to work? 

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6 hours ago, Harry Voyager said:

Wait, that works now?

so much simpler than it used to be.......

on Windows + steam

all my games are saved on a 4TB USB drive

1) install windows

2) install steam

3) open steam >settings>downloads > point to USB drive

4) start install of game ( then it should say discovering existing files )

5) start playing

 

this saves a lot of isp bandwidth

current main system: as of 1st Jan 2023

motherboard : Gigabyte B450M DS3H V2

CPU: Ryzen 5 3600

ram : 16Gig Corsair Vengeance 3600mhz

OS :multi-boot

Video Card : RX 550 4 GIG

Monitor: BENQ 21 inch

 

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10 hours ago, Harry Voyager said:

@OhioYJ Do you know if that works with MS store games too? Or is that to much of an over embedded fluster cluck to work? 

Nope. My recommendation is never buy anything from the Microsoft store, way too many downsides. However I get it, for example, my son plays Minecraft, at this point no way around it, have to use the Microsoft store. With the Microsoft store you're pretty much out of luck as far as I know. Heck it'll fight you just trying to delete and start over with the folder. 

 

The only other store I know about is Epic, and that one supposedly you can use some work arounds to sort of make it work, but it's not straight forward either. I don't use Epic either, but again my son does, I've always just wiped it and started over.

 

Steam seems to be the only one that makes it straight forward. It's been a long time since I've used GOG, but if I remember right, GOG was pretty straight forward too? 

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11 hours ago, OhioYJ said:

Nope. My recommendation is never buy anything from the Microsoft store, way too many downsides. However I get it, for example, my son plays Minecraft, at this point no way around it, have to use the Microsoft store. With the Microsoft store you're pretty much out of luck as far as I know. Heck it'll fight you just trying to delete and start over with the folder. 

 

The only other store I know about is Epic, and that one supposedly you can use some work arounds to sort of make it work, but it's not straight forward either. I don't use Epic either, but again my son does, I've always just wiped it and started over.

 

Steam seems to be the only one that makes it straight forward. It's been a long time since I've used GOG, but if I remember right, GOG was pretty straight forward too? 

Yeah, I do MSFS, so stuck with the store. Also, Gamepass is very nice with an Xbox. 

 

I've never actually used the GoG installer. I usually just download the install files and set the up fully stand-alone.

 

That said, I mostly use GoG for the X-Wing series, so the Win95 versions are just a direct file transfer.

 

Epic Game store, I only use for the free games really. And I still haven't actually played Control yet. Need to do that after this hardware upgrade. 

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29 minutes ago, Harry Voyager said:

Yeah, I do MSFS, so stuck with the store. Also, Gamepass is very nice with an Xbox. 

 

I've never actually used the GoG installer. I usually just download the install files and set the up fully stand-alone.

 

That said, I mostly use GoG for the X-Wing series, so the Win95 versions are just a direct file transfer.

 

Epic Game store, I only use for the free games really. And I still haven't actually played Control yet. Need to do that after this hardware upgrade. 

 

I can definitely recommend Control. I really enjoyed that one. 

 

I have a handful of games on GOG, but most of them I've honestly rebought on Steam as it's more convenient. As for real old stuff I have physical copies still for a bunch of stuff. 

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16 hours ago, OhioYJ said:

Nope. My recommendation is never buy anything from the Microsoft store,

you sure its a bought copy and not rented ( subscription based ) 🤣

 

keep trying to get my daughter to put in a complaint ...... forced to buy the other version of minecraft game ( bedrock ) EVEN though she was supposed to have had both versions in the first place java + bedrock....

 

given the mess they made of mojang she's now spent about $70 on minecraft through 2 accounts and that doesnt include her original account that we bought for her  

current main system: as of 1st Jan 2023

motherboard : Gigabyte B450M DS3H V2

CPU: Ryzen 5 3600

ram : 16Gig Corsair Vengeance 3600mhz

OS :multi-boot

Video Card : RX 550 4 GIG

Monitor: BENQ 21 inch

 

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3 hours ago, cretsiah said:

keep trying to get my daughter to put in a complaint ...... forced to buy the other version of minecraft game ( bedrock ) EVEN though she was supposed to have had both versions in the first place java + bedrock....

Oh I know all too well. Among my many complaints about the Microsoft store... I had a problem with my Minecraft "purchase" originally' for my son and Microsoft would do nothing to help. So I just contacted my credit card company a filed a dispute and got my money back that way. 

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@OhioYJ @cretsiah Just a followup on the installs. The Steam games do seem to have successfully migrated. However, MSFS seems to have hidden about 400-800Gb of files on the flight drive, so I ended up having to format it to recover the lost space. 

 

Oddly enough, the other Xbox games just left folders full of encrypted files behind. Have not tried reinstalling any of them yet, though. 

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7 hours ago, Harry Voyager said:

@OhioYJ @cretsiah Just a followup on the installs. The Steam games do seem to have successfully migrated. However, MSFS seems to have hidden about 400-800Gb of files on the flight drive, so I ended up having to format it to recover the lost space. 

 

Oddly enough, the other Xbox games just left folders full of encrypted files behind. Have not tried reinstalling any of them yet, though. 

 

If you setup Microsoft to install programs or games to another drive there should be a folder on that drive that it won't let you touch by default. Microsoft also won't use that folder again (just to make your life difficult, or because they hate their customers?). You can take ownership of it and delete it, but Windows makes it pain. 

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11 hours ago, OhioYJ said:

If you setup Microsoft to install programs or games to another drive there should be a folder on that drive that it won't let you touch by default.

wonder if thats what been giving me trouble with my usb' s 😞

current main system: as of 1st Jan 2023

motherboard : Gigabyte B450M DS3H V2

CPU: Ryzen 5 3600

ram : 16Gig Corsair Vengeance 3600mhz

OS :multi-boot

Video Card : RX 550 4 GIG

Monitor: BENQ 21 inch

 

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1 hour ago, cretsiah said:

wonder if thats what been giving me trouble with my usb' s 😞

That's if it's leftover from the old install. Of course Microsoft won't let you touch it anyways. The OS can though. 

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16 hours ago, OhioYJ said:

 

If you setup Microsoft to install programs or games to another drive there should be a folder on that drive that it won't let you touch by default. Microsoft also won't use that folder again (just to make your life difficult, or because they hate their customers?). You can take ownership of it and delete it, but Windows makes it pain. 

I think that is part of what happened. Once I found out about the God Mode folder, I discovered that Windows 11 has additional level of hidden files that are not revealed by setting the folder view to show all files.

 

My guess is it hid the MSFS directory as one of those, but I've already formatted the drive so can't prove it for sure. 

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