Re: ... but what about the T&C ?
@ psychonaut
couldnt disgree more. get disk from machine, put in caddy.
Prefer not to open machines without a damned good reason, especially in the case of some laptops (eg Dell) which require removing the m/b to get the HDD out. If we're doing a fan clean or other work then maybe. Prefer to either clone off to USB HDD or to an image on the network.
2) make backup clone of orignal disk on server just in case theyve put something somewhere stupid
Just in case? I'd say nearly 50% of machines either have bad users or bad software that puts stuff elsewhere.
3) get product keys with produkey
While I don't recall produkey by name (I've tried a number of those sort of tools), a lot of things don't give up their keys easily.
And there's a few packages out there that cannot be re-installed, you need to buy a new license (names don't come to mind atm but I think you may find a few MS products and some rather wonderful[spit] accounting packages are like this - upgrade the OS is fine, re-install the software is not allowable and often not do-able)
takes a little longer, but measure twice cut once, so a proper job. the "issues" you refer to are exactly because you do in place upgrades.
What, having the job done cleanly and smoothly with little fuss or problems, the customer retaining the machine that is configured how they want it with their photos, emails, icons etc where they left them?
sorry, but its a cowboy way to do it.
MS seems to disagree [shudder - am I agreeing with them on something?].. Don't forget that for a while you could only do 8.1 in-place, you could not download an ISO, you could not download it once for several machines, it had to be done for the individual machine.. How could I have done a full clean install of 8.1 on a customers machine when you could not get 8.1 separately? 10 is the same in some cases.
I am doing the job my customers want. Most of the time it goes through cleanly and the customer's experience is better because it was done in place. Most of the time it works well. Yes, this is me saying this.. Most of the time OS upgrades with Windows go fairly smoothly without major issue.. Yes, I, confirmed passionate MS hater, say this.
if customer have lost their keys, thats their problem. 90% of the time i can recover them anyway.
Says the guy who was calling us "cowboys" a paragraph earlier. Sorry, we treat our customers better than that. Yes, can often and easily recover them but not always. And a lot of our customers (the majority, strangely), are not really computer literate and don't necessarily understand the need for keeping such things - they brought the computer/software and own it, right?
We sometimes have to tell a customer that something is lost, but..
in place upgrade is asking for trouble, as you have discovered - as haver lots of win 10 customers
Yup, but that's more the fault of the release of W10 than anything else. It seems to have the worst driver support (today had to tell a customer that he could have W10 or bluetooth, but not both for the time being - his year old HP doesn't get bluetooth W10 drivers and the 8.1 drivers aren't compatible). I've done XP-7 in place upgrades (easy to do if you use a Vista disk ;) ), Vista-7 and 8, 7-8 [should be posting anonymous to admit that!], and lots of Linux ones (sometimes covering several years in one jump) with an over 90% success rate. That is a small sample of only a few hundred machines, but it's enough for me.
Many of those that failed would not run the new OS anyway. Incompatible or faulty hardware, missing critical drivers.. Some could be fixed with a small hardware change, some couldn't.
Sometimes they get a completely new (or refurbished) machine with their old stuff in a VM, with as much of it on the new machine as possible.
But I stand by the end result. The machine is clean (always the 2nd stage after cloning), running properly, and everything is as close to what the customer knows and is used to as can possibly be done with a new OS - sometimes includes things like Classic Shell to help.
As I said earlier - a lot of our customers are older and/or largely computer illiterate. Many use computers as a basic communication tool and have little other interest in it or desire to use it. They don't want "new", they want familiar. They want what they know. They don't want change, they want their machine to function in a way they know - faster and more stable, but familiar. A changed interface is often a failure on my part.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
