in-place reinstall

[Trident]

I had upgraded to Windows 10 from Win 7. I purchased a copy of MS Office 2012 and a couple of other programs which transferred over without a problem.

My question; Is it possible to do a in-place total reinstall, of this Windows 10 upgraded version in order to preserve the "paid" programs I have installed. I had purchased a copy of Windowss 10, same version, which I haven't used.

If possible, can you lead me to a source

 

[Trouble]

As long as Windows 10 has been installed and activated on your computer, you can....
Install (clean or in-place upgrade repair) whenever you want.
I would suggest that you obtain the latest ISO from here
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sof...459594)(TnL5HPStwNw-WaTVja5C7z2Vs7q82apCPg)()
Making sure that the ISO you download matches your currently installed version in all respects

Neosmart has a pretty good article on it here https://neosmart.net/wiki/windows-10-repair-installation/
You can skip the first couple paragraphs where they are promoting their recovery CDs and drill down to the meat of the article below.

That will generally keep all your programs, data, drivers and such safe, but.....
I would still create a disk image before going forward. Just to be on the safe side.

 

[Saltgrass]

I just went through an in-place upgrade and it kept Thunderbird installed where a Reset will remove it.

The tutorial you linked, Trouble, does not mention the message you get about booting from install media and do you want to upgrade or Clean Install. Since you don't want to do a clean install the only choice is for an upgrade. The message is not shown in the normal way but just an open dialog window, perhaps it is a bug.

 

[jaco2x4]

Hi,

From what I have seen you cannot do a clean install of Win 10 and preserve any paid programs you have installed subsequent to the initial install/upgrade to Win 10. The repair function at boot, to the best of my knowledge, allows keeping apps but I believe these apps are modern apps and not standard Windows desktop applications.

You can do a restore using a restore point created after any paid for program installations and retain these programs. Even a Reset will remove these programs and upgraded drivers but the reset will give you an option to keep personal files. Please see this Microsoft Support site for recovery options.

So you must have offline copies or access to copies of the paid for programs and the product keys as you will have to reinstall the programs.

Having a known good disk image is the way to go. You can use the baked in Windows Recovery option in Control Panel or use third party disk imaging software. Some good vendors are: Paragon, Macrium, or EaseUS.

Jaco