I don't even know what's left to be said about your experience other than it seems to have resulted from a lack of experience.

Btw, you know 'Bill' hasn't been at MS for quite a long time now. They are on their third boss now. This thread is starting to confirm some of my earlier suspicions of troll bait.

I've only been using Bill's Best since about 1998 so I guess that still makes me a beginner, and anyway by now I should just *know* that the way to do a clean install is to upgrade from 7, miss out 8 and 8.1, jumping direct to 10 and then perform some reset operation.  I mean it's just obvious.  People are *born* knowing this, right?   It didn't work that way in any previous release I used (98, 98SE, 2000 Pro, XP Home/Pro, Vista, 7 - I never bought installed 8 or 8.1)

The problem with MS Update and Nvidia's installer conflicting and leaving people with 800x600 is widely known and hardly unique.  Nvidia claimed yesterday that their latest driver (just released in the last couple of days) worked around this - it didn't work for me.

Anyway these have been my honest and unvarnished experiences.  I didn't do any weird stuff.  The biggest problem was not expecting to have to disconnect all other storage devices (disks, DVD drives and all) just to work around an issue with Win Update.  Also it had never occured to me that my Windows system disk would have to be on the very first SATA controller on the board.  This all smells of programming using hardcoded paths, and that is really poor.

I guess if I was the only person who ran into the update issues I wouldn't have found knowledgebase and microsoft answers dealing with this.

Btw Billy G is still MS's senior Technology Advisor and I read an interview with him only a week or two ago in which he said this occupies about a third of his time.  He's the guy Satya Nadella turns to for guidance.

I'm glad Win 10 upgrade worked out fine for you and others here.  For me with only about 17 years of doing this stuff it has been my poorest MS upgrade experience so far, while I had expected it to be the best.  I thought the Win 7 installer was maybe the easiest, simplest installer I ever used and one of the quickest, of any OS (Windows Update process is a whole other story).  I was kind of expecting more of the same.  What I got on extremely plain, widely used commodity hardware, was a labyrinthine journey with several unforseeable but serious pitfalls, caveats and gotchas that were new but not mentioned or easily discoverable until the shit had already hit the fan, and all leading to an OS that is not really usable.

I guess that makes me a troll.

net stop wuauserv
sc config wuauserv start= disabled

Problem solved.

Honestly if you're that familiar with Windows, you should know that ANY hardware driver from Windows Update is guaranteed to be....

The nvidia driver issue is not to do with MS supplying an old driver, or that the MS service fails to deliver any driver except a basic VGA driver.  It's that the MS update service prevents the nvidia driver updater installing a driver.  It worked fine on 98/2000/xp/7 - no conflict, use whichever method you like, but this time it is just a screw up.  If this was some edge case hardware like a USB hub or something I could live with it, but full GPU support is too big a deal on a desktop system to ignore.  My nvidia card is an aftermarket one in a PCI-E slot and the BIOS is correctly set to use it.  It works on any OS except Win 10 (for example it has worked fine on this same machine in Debian, FreeBSD, and Win 7).  I am guessing, but don't know, that if the GPU was integrated into the motherboard this issue wouldn't arise.   I believe what I experienced is typical of an OS that hasn't been thoroughly tested and/or has been rushed out  to meet a delivery target, ready or not.

Thanks for clarifying which Billy you kept referring to. Kind of hard to figure out the details from your stream of consciousness.

I don't have Win10 yet because MS told me to wait after I 'reserved' my copy for them to say when it was ready for my PC. They did this with GWX to ensure proper hardware compatibility and server bandwidth availability.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-10-upgrade-availability,29696.html

has been rushed out  to meet a delivery target, ready or not.

You chose to disregard their instructions and go it on your own initiative and complained of hardware compatibility and server bandwidth issues. Well I guess we shouldn't be shocked someone didn't follow directions and ran into the very issues they warned about. Reminds me of the wife in the passenger seat with the map her husband refuses to look at because he just 'knows'. Thanks for the impressions from your case study. Sounds like you had fun.