Changing Window 7 to Window 10

[Mike Warren]

On Window 7 home version I am presently making a documentary film using VS X10. My question is... will I have any problem when I change Window 7 on my computer over to Window 10. Will VS X10 still function properly when on Window 10? Thank you. Regards, Mike

[Ken Berry]

X10 certainly continued to work just fine when I switched over to Win 10. However, that was a couple of years ago now. Hopefully others with a more recent switch over will also comment.

One thing, though... I assume you will just be getting Win 10 from the MS download site -- or do you have a disc? If a download and you haven't yet downloaded it, you are likely to get the very latest version of Win 10 which is called 2004 (a sort of build number). There have been a lot -- and I mean a lot -- of complaints about a wide variety of problems with 2004. I understood Microsoft might have withdrawn it till most of the problems have been fixed. However, I suspect what that really means is that they are just not making it available to computers which might have parts not fully compatible with the current 2004. If you download directly from the Windows site, however, you will get 2004 warts and all.

Now there have been no specific complaints here in this forum as yet about incompatibilities between any version of Video Studio and 2004, but it is still early days as far as 2004 is concerned. My own main computer is an Intel NUC with 32 GB of Optane memory. One problem with 2004, which MS has not yet recognized, is that Optane will no longer work under 2004. Yet my Update page tells me 2004 is ready and waiting for me. My own inclination, therefore, would be to finish your project(s) in Win 7, and only then make the switch. Perhaps by then as well MS will have fixed most of the problems with 2004. I certainly will be waiting to hear they have at least fixed the Optane problem before I upgrade...

[Davidk]

Mike,
I have had a lot of issues with upgrading win7 to win10 associated with Video studio. It's been a bust for 3 attempts so far. There's forum post about it dated about 1 Feb 2020. But learnings from that are:
1. A clean install of win10 is commonly suggested. That will mean re-installing everything: software, hardware like printers etc, including VS. I found that even with original distribution disks, installing old items can be "it won't work" as an install but the item ran fine when it was already installed (this bit - see next para: I stubbed my literal toes here with a 10 year old printer that works fine: but the install disks would not run successfully under win10 to attach it to a clean install of the OS).

Keep in mind that the new windows may re-letter all your drives, unless you use the C: drive default option to install things, including photos, audio and video clips. Why does that matter? The vsp stores where the material used in the vsp is on the PC, by drive/folder/filename. So if you find windows has re-lettered drives where your data is, then either you will have to learn how to use windows to change/re-map them back to the way they were; or living with it, you will have a substantial re-link activity to do on each vsp the first time you next open it. Nevertheless, with these provisos, once win10 is installed, and then everything else, your projects should run fine.

2. A migrated install of win10 is MS recommended option - to do this MS suggests that you start from within a running win7 session. And it takes all the software and settings you have in win7 over to win10. Simple?? EXCEPT the visual C++re-distributables that Video studio uses, installed under win7, won't run. You can find these in the control panel/programs & features page. And they are very sensitive to the version of the OS running when VS was initially installed. For a win7 OS, the versions of those programs are selected for that, to use the runtime that is part of win7. Migrating these to win10 means they won't work with the runtime version that is part of the new OS. What happened to me (not - at the time - knowing this) is that starting VS (any version) under new win10 worked fine, selecting the share page and it hung up, half displayed: like this screenshot;

And I needed task manager to recover. On this test all my VS versions failed the same way. It took me weeks of heartburn and google searching trying to find out why.
So if you are inclined to take option 2, uninstall the VS programs and C++ re-distributables before you do the migration. Re-install VS afterwards and the installer selects the right re-dist versions for win10 as part of that process.