I installed my OEM Win 7 to a spare disk and ran Win Update. It displayed the Win 10 icon in the notification area inviting me to upgrade to Windows 10.
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.
err, no. I installed my OEM Win 7 to a spare disk and ran Win Update. It displayed the Win 10 icon in the notification area inviting me to upgrade to Windows 10. At that point I ran Windows update again because, despite being an idiot noob, I did actually notice over the years that sometimes Win update sometimes says no more updates until you "check for updates" again and Hey presto! There were more friggin updates. My aim was just to initially get Win 7 as up to date as is possible so as to make a disk image of it before proceeding with any upgrade to a new OS version.Microsoft (that's Microsoft, not Tom's Hardware) posts advice as to how to proceed with the upgrade if the updgrade notification mysteriously disappears after an upgrade or a reboot. I followed their advice. Yeah, noob backs up, noob images disks, noob reads the map and is kind to wifey, sometimes even other people's wifey.Anyway thanks for your friendly and insightful comments.
In case you weren't aware, Nvidia always seems to be playing catch up with drivers and the latest OS. One of the biggest issues with the Vista launch was that Nvidia didn't have their drivers ready despite months of OS beta testing. Very unstable drivers. With 10, MS had the preview out for months, and yet Nvidia AND AMD didn't get their Win10 drivers out until launch day, more or less.
It seems like no one was on the ball with drivers this time. As far as I'm aware Intel's integrated GFX driver is still beta and somewhat unstable, which is why I'm holding off on my Celery boxes.
