Monday, August 17, 2015

Update to Windows 10 Immediately Without Wait Validating from Microsoft

Netsec August 17, 2015 Windows

One of my windows 7 laptop is still waiting Microsoft to validate my computer's specific but my another one has been notified and successfully automatically updated. After a couple of weeks waiting, this weekend I lost patience and decided to find other ways to update my windows 7 to windows 10.

One way I found is to use Microsoft media creation tool. Microsoft has provided a URL to download software for those who do not want to wait and want to update to win10 by themselves: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10 .

This Microsoft URL provides 32-bit version and 64-bit version tools for different devices. A blank USB or DVD (and DVD burner) with at least 4 GB of space will be needed if you want to create media.

Since my laptop is running on 32-bit version Windows 7, I downloaded this 32-bit tool MediaCreationTool.exe. When ran it, something happened (Something happened 0x80070490 - 0x20016) windows shows up.

Error: Something happened 0x80070490 - 0x20016

After searched Internet I found there is a useful tip to fix this annoying and meaningless error message.

By adding a new DWORD (32-bit) AllowOSUpgrade value 1 under registry tree \\Computer\HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\WindowsUpdate\OSUpgrade, it will enable automatically windows update to download windows 10 into your machine.

AllowOSUpgrade value in Regedit

After closed Registry Editor window opened by command Regedit, Windows update automatically started to download Windows 10 updates.

Downloading Windows 10

After download 100% completed, it started the process to prepare for Windows 10 installation.

Preparing for Windows 10 installation

You may get a license agreement window, accept it, windows will ask you to reboot your machine to start this update. Waiting updating for around 30 minutes, there are a couple of rebooting during whole process. You machine's screen will show percentage and notify you where the procedures is. Eventually you will get into lovely Windows 10 screen.