John & Jane Doe wrote:
My main question right now is how to proceed to do two things:
1. Wipe out everything not needed
2. But keep the Win10 OS intact
Here is a picture of the new (to me) Windows 10 desktop.
https://s27.postimg.org/udef4ncoz/image.gif
This post is just to explain the specifications as I know them to be.
Windows 10 Pro version 1511
(but the sticker says Windows 7 Home Premium OA 64 bit)
HP Pavilion Model P6230Y. AMD Phenom II 810. 16GB RAM, 930GB HDD
ATI Radeon HD 4200
There is only one user but the 930GB HDD only has 380GB space left.
I don't want any of her stuff but I want to be careful what I delete.
What I really want to do is wipe everything out and start over but I don't
want to lose the existing Windows 10 license.
At the moment, I created a new user (which you see in the photo as it took
a long time on the first login for some reason).
The only odd thing, so far, is that I can't find the Wi-Fi settings because
this computer was apparently always on the Ethernet whereas for me it will
likely be on Wi-Fi so it hasn't been on the net yet.
Since I loved Windows XP, and I since skipped Windows 7, 8, and 9 (or
whatever the versions were), I will have a steep learning curve (I can tell
already by clicking about).
The main question right now is how best to proceed to get rid of all the
stuff from the previous owner WITHOUT destroying the Windows 10 license?
Your computer has a motherboard, with what is
effectively a serial number (to make this explanation
a bit simpler to understand).
When the previous user took advantage of the free upgrade
offer, to go from a copy of Windows 7 to Windows 10, the
computer was registered on a Microsoft server. A "digital
entitlement" entry was created.
At any future time, if the Win10 OS is clean installed using
a downloadable DVD (available for free from Microsoft), the
instant the machine gets on the network, it sends its
serial number to the server at Microsoft. The server at
Microsoft says "oh, I've seen this machine before, and
you got the free upgrade from me". And your OS is
then activated again. So the fact the machine was
activated the first time, is remembered on the server end.
Any future install of Win10, should re-activate, based
on the physical evidence presented (serial number).
When does this stop working ? If you change too much hardware
inside the computer. If you burned out the motherboard and
had to replace it, the "digital entitlement" might be ruined
by that. But otherwise, you should be able to clean
install without an issue.
*******
The next topic is backups. Do you use backup software ?
Do you have an external drive to store backups ?
Maintaining a computer is easy, if you have backup
images. If you make a mistake, you can restore from
backup. The size of the image, is only as large as
the size of the file set. So if you had a 2TB drive
with 300GB of files, the backup takes 300GB of space.
In that example, you'd need a 500GB drive for the
external storage media, as a convenient minimum size.
Free backup software is available. When prompted, you
do want to make the emergency boot CD, which helps
if you entirely ruin the OS on the hard drive :-)
http://www.macrium.com/reflectfree.asp
Yes, the CNET download is clean... The emergency
boot CD can use one of four WinPE versions, and
WinPE5 or WinPE10 should be good for most purposes.
*******
You can download a 15063 Creator DVD (the latest version)
and do a clean install if you want. There will be no
memory of Windows 7 at all.
As it stands now, the machine could have a recovery partition
(12 to 15GB) with a clean copy of Windows 7 with drivers in it.
With the press of the right F-key at startup, you may be able
to re-install Windows 7 again if the need arises. If you
"blast" all the partitions on the drive during your Windows
clean install adventure, that copy of Windows 7 would be lost.
Just don't delete all the structure on the disk, if you
want to keep materials like that for later.
To learn more about your install, there are some
commands you can execute.
This one works as an ordinary user.
winver
The following one, you might want to run a Command Prompt
with Run As Administrator. This was easy on the older
versions of Win10, as right-clicking start had
the Administrator Command Prompt in it. In 15063,
there is a setting in the Setting gear wheel, to
put that item back in the menu. Alternately, type
"cmd" into Cortana search hole, right-click the
top entry returned, and select "Run As Administrator"
to launch an administrator command prompt. Then...
slmgr /dlv
And that will show more details.
That shows the current activation/licensing info. The
license key is generic (when a Digital Entitlement
has been used and not a "real" purchased key), so for
the most part, the license key is useless in such
cases.
This picture shows my output on a Win10 Pro x64 install.
Likely a "digital entitlement" as I would not be buying
the retail version.
https://s13.postimg.org/ivl5bjcxz/whats_my_OS.gif
HTH,
Paul