How to Prepare Your Computer for Windows 10 Upgrade

Who doesn't want to stay up-to-date? Updating your OS has tons of benefits if you choose the right OS and follow the required steps: Improved performance, more beautiful and slicker interface and so on. Don't you fancy the speed and reliability and new features of your office desktop Windows? Put all these aside, security is the element that makes it necessary to keep your Windows OS for instance if you are a Windows guy, up-to-date. OK, now that you have buckled up to do some upgrades, you need to ask yourself this important question: What do I need to update my OS? To answer that question you have to make sure of the following preparations before Windows 10 upgrade.

1Do I have the system requirements to switch to Windows 10?

These are the official system requirements published by Microsoft:

Processor: 1 gigahertz (GHz) or faster processor or SoC
RAM: 1 gigabyte (GB) for 32-bit or 2GB for 64-bit
Hard Disk Space: 16GB for 32-bit OS 20 GB for 64-bit OS
Graphics Card: DirectX 9 or later with WDDM 1.0 driver
Display: 800*600

2I have business documents and family photos, favorite songs, what should I do with them?

The most important thing to do is to take a backup of your essential files such as songs, photos, documents or even certain applications that you work with and the folders containing certain types of files you might consider important. If you use some premium applications like Microsoft Office, you may want to take a backup of their product keys as well. You have two options:

Manual Backup: You can sift through the folders on your hard disk and select the files yourself. Simply copy your files and paste them into preferably an external hard disk for later use. Simple as that!
Premium Image and Backup Applications: Although it might come costly, you can put the entire burden on the shoulders of premium applications such as Paragon Backup & Recovery 12 Home, O&O DiskImage Professional 8 etc. The list of such applications is pretty long and this article does not recommend any particular application to users. You can google them anyway, right?

3I don't recall the last time I actually updated my PC's drivers.

Unfortunately, that is a pretty serious drawback. Honestly, if you don't want to get stuck in an extensive range of malfunctions and bugs after finishing the upgrade, you have to have the most recent drivers installed before you actually proceed to the upgrading process. There are simple steps through which you can actually indicate how old your current drivers are. Don’t worry. Both steps are easy as heck!

If you know the specifications of your PC, you can head to Device Manager and right click on a specific segment and click Update Driver. Obviously, you have to have Internet access as well or you can visit the producer’ website and download the drivers manually, which is probably quite a pain in the butt to many of us!
Giants like NVidia, present tools that can easily be downloaded through their website and they automatically specify and update your drivers. That's that! Piece of cake huh?

4I have many peripherals. Will they cause any trouble?

However odd it might sound in the first place, if you are the kind of guy with 3 USB hubs, 5 Bluetooth devices and 5 external hard disks or devices as such and attach all of them to your PC 24/7, there is a tiny portion of possibility that you might face some trouble during the upgrade process. By malfunctions, I mean malfunctions! Your screen could go black; upgrade may freeze all of a sudden. So if you take an advice from a computer geek, you best detach them before you proceed with the upgrade.

5What if I'm an architect, designer? Will my Premium applications work on Windows 10?

What you are concerned about and you should be, is the compatibility issue. A Good old-time friend of any PC user! With the help of the genius boys and girls at Microsoft, you should not be worried that much; most of the application that run quite smoothly on Windows 7, 8 or 8.1 will remain smooth and fine on Windows 10 as well. Should you be too worried about your Illustrator for example, there is always a way out. Before proceeding to Windows 10 upgrade, contact your application's support team and ask for compatibility issues. If you face any troubles after the upgrade, uninstalling and reinstalling the application could fix that in some cases.

Whatever you do, do not make a fuss over preparation thing. If you just take the above-mentioned steps carefully and believe in your skills and most importantly keep patient, you can successfully finalize the upgrade and enjoy the smooth breeze of Windows 10 in almost no time.