Newfound wisdom about installing and upgrading

This post is based on my experiences as detailed in the initial post of this thread. I thought that Winaero causes screen to go black - multiple new Win 2H23 Pro installs - but I was WRONG

After struggling for three days, it finally dawned on me to get the Lenovo recovery software for my wife's new Slim 7i and my 2020-ish T14s. It's not super-straightforward to get this download available as a digital download (for the princely price of $0.00) but was doable. The actual download of about 20 GB to your system proceeds very slowly, and then creating a Recovery USB also takes time. Once you start the recovery process, it seems to take about 90 minutes. The recovery process wipes out the existing contents of your system drive.

So here is my newfound wisdom. If you purchased a system, be sure to get a copy of the recovery software. If you have an issue with Windows, back up all your data, including /downloads and /documents, and then use the recovery USB.
If you have a homebuilt system with an existing Windows 10 install, do not do a clean install. Instead, by all means, do an upgrade install.
If you have a new homebuilt system, if possible, install Windows 10 to be sure that all drivers are installed. Then upgrade to Win 11.

Be sure to back up your system drivers before upgrading.

If you are doing a new install with a USB key created by the MS MCT, you can speed up the install process if you have Ethernet in your network, even if the system in question does not have an Ethernet jack. Just get a ~$30 Ethernet to USB C adapter. I got mine from Cable Matters, but I'm sure that there are other products that will work, and for 2.5 GBe.

Win 11 Pro 2H23 22361.4602

Comments welcome.

Did you try an in-place upgrade repair before rolling back?

@x509

I gave you ten cookies just for fill9ing out your computer specs.

There really is no need to buy vendor recovery software. There are plenty of good image recovery tools e.g. Macrium Reflect Free (still working), AOMEI, Easeus, Hasleo etc.

Regarding clean install of Windows 11 over an existing Windows 10, certainly no issue provided you have exported drivers from working Windows 10 first.

The most common sense actions before upgrading to Windows are:

1) Make image backup of working pc

2) export drivers to a usb drive

3) optional but recommended - uninstall tweaks like winaero, startallback, 3rd party av tools. You can reinstall again afterwards.

Clean installs on a blank drive can be tricky if pc has an nvme drive. You may need to download IRST drivers first. In general, Windows 11 will sort; out most drivers but you may need to sort out some after installation.

The factory reset software will take you back to the computer's state out of the box. It is provided for the convenience of retailers. You will be told to use this because they then don't have to provide any technical support after the customer has done something that stops the computer working. It will also require you to redo all the updates that Windows has put out since the computer was manufactured. You'd be better off downloading an up-to-date ISO from MS.

What you have actually just learned are what we all used to do 10 years ago.
No one needs a recovery software if you know how to create a backup image which will only take several minutes and probably much, much faster than downloading a recovery software and creating a USB tool.
Never use 3rd party software that promises faster operating system. They are usually the opposite and causes more issues.
Clean install Win 11 directly. No need to install Win 10 first.
Now that you have solved the problem, you should start creating back up image so you can easily solve future issues in minutes.

Winowsxlite is a third party program that does deliver on a lighter and faster Windows, so I can't agree with you. It has no downsides.

Faster system is hardware related. If you have good hardware, your PC will run fast. PC booster software does nothing but eat up resources, run in background and slow you down.

But if your system has modest specs Windowsxlite uses fewer resources and this does make the system faster. I wish you would try it before opinionating. It's very good on old computers that can't have more than 2GB.

badrobot said:

Faster system is hardware related. If you have good hardware, your PC will run fast.

Click to expand...

x509 said:

So here is my newfound wisdom. If you purchased a system, be sure to get a copy of the recovery software. If you have an issue with Windows, back up all your data, including /downloads and /documents, and then use the recovery USB.
If you have a homebuilt system with an existing Windows 10 install, do not do a clean install. Instead, by all means, do an upgrade install.
If you have a new homebuilt system, if possible, install Windows 10 to be sure that all drivers are installed. Then upgrade to Win 11.

Click to expand...

A reset would do a factory recover, no need anything else.
After you setup the computer the way you want it (with your data or only the system), I suggest you create a drive image and store it on an external drive so you can recover it anytime in case things go wrong.