I don't remember how I upgraded to Windows 10, though I think I did it in the context of a complete hardware upgrade for my primary system, so I really didn't have a choice about installing from scratch, and the same certainly applies to Windows 11 (my 18-month-old mid-end system could not run Windows 11, because it didn't have the required security hardware). I did upgrade my wife's Surface Pro from 10 to 11, and that went without problems like a routine Windows Update update, but took a bit longer (20-30 minutes, from memory). In general, assuming that you have hardware that is running Windows 10 and can run Windows 11, the upgrade should be and, from reports, generally is that easy.Now, I consider all versions of Windows after 7 as TBA, so that's where I stopped paying attention, so I don't really know anything definite, but how does Windows handle updates? I.e., suppose I am happily chugging along with, say, Windows 10, and now MS insists that I've got to upgrade to Windows 11. How smoothly does that go?
My point is that in all the versions that I know about (up to and including 7), it was pretty much reformat, re-install, start over from scratch (*). Has that changed?
Statistics: Posted by pfletch101 — Thu Oct 02, 2025 11:09 pm