Edia Loc: Central New Jersey

I tried to update to Windows 10 and I got the dreaded WHEA_UNRECOVERABLE_ERROR message. After 5 hours on the phone with Costco, Dell and Microsoft, it was determined that I had to reformat my Hard Drive and then reload everything. Thank God I had most of my files on an external Drive. It took me a whole day to do that but now the computer is back running well. I even tried to load Windows 10 again an this time I was successful. My computer runs faster and the interface is much better then on Windows 8.1.
The moral of the story is DONT UPGRADE TO WINDOWS 10 WITHOUT BACKING UP YOUR IMPORTANT FILES AND PROGRAMS.

tainkc Loc: Kansas City

Duh. But we all make those mistakes at some time.

wingclui44 Loc: CT USA

The problem on up grading to W-10 shows differently on different user. Most of the people up grade theirs without problem. I think it all depends on what is your original system and how did it operate. For example, my laptop was original a Vista, and up-graded to W-7 pro, then I up-graded it to W-10. All's fine but a little trouble. I will lost my WiFi internet connection in once a while. No big deal, just trouble shoot and fixed it. All my programs and files are safe. I did do the back up to my external drive before the up-grading.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

It would be nice to know what went wrong. Reformatting a drive is always a desperate, last resort.

Edia Loc: Central New Jersey

I think that I got some bad Tech support from Dell (India).
When I surfed the Net, I found that I could have recovered by pressing the F8 Key during startup. Oh well, I should have looked there before calling Dell.

jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

Press F8/reformat and reinstall everything - six of one, half a dozen of another. :D

bgl Loc: Brooklyn,New York

I have 2 desktops running Win 7 (1 home premium, the other Win 7 Pro) and neither will complete the Win 10 installation) I also have a brand new desktop running Windows 10). They are all XPS Dells and covered by Dell premium support (hardware and software). In my long experience with Dell, XPS support has been pretty good and responsive. The consensus at Dell seems to be "wait a while" for the dust to settle because a great many of their customers are having similar problems.

Kuzano

I've worked on PC's for 25 years and taught Windows at community ed level 22 years.

You may not like what I am about to say, and I am sorry for your many hours spent. Shame about that.

But the reality is that you may now be running one of the cleanest Windows 10 installs mentioned so far on this forum. It's extremely smart you backed everything up.

But consider this, most people running Windows 10 so far have been lucky (?maybe). Most of us who have had no upgrade problem have little or no idea what crud and corruption we laid the new Windows 10 over the top of. Your's blew up. Perhaps luckily so.

Because of that you reloaded a clean operating system and then upgraded to Windows 10 over that new clean system.

Of the ten computers I have upgraded to 10 so far, the best running machines were formatted (my choice because they were XP and W10 won't upgrade XP) with Windows 7 and then ran the W10 upgrade.

Those 3 computers run the best of the lot. Considering they are lesser hardware having been XP machines, that's a testament to formatting and starting clean.

I don't know specifically why your upgrade failed, but in the long run, you are very likely better served by having reformatted the drive and starting clean.

Quite frankly, and this may make many cringe, I never run a computer a year without backing up all the data, reformatting the drive and reloading everything.... everything. Then put the data back in place if I am going to run it from a drive in the computer.

So, there may be a silver lining in all that trouble after all.

Oh, and I hate talking to East Indian support. With my hearing, I spend endless hours having them spell everything for me. I spent twenty minutes with "HENRY" in India figuring out the word "debug"?

marcomarks Loc: Ft. Myers, FL

My wife's little laptop suddenly said it was loading Windows 10 the other day. I immediately went in and turned off auto update. It stopped whatever it was doing. Now it says "Windows 10 update available" at the bottom right of the screen instead. Last night I ran AVG PC Tuneup and it said there was an error on the hard drive. It quickly fixed it but I have been wondering if that was an error caused by WIndows 10 because this laptop has never had a hard drive error since it was new no matter what was done to it.

PC Tuneup has been telling me that only 1.93GB of memory is available and that Windows 7 needs 2GB, so how would Windows 10, which is certainly larger than WIndows 7, ever work on this laptop anyway? What do they want to do to me, download Windows 10 and then it can't possibly work right?