PG Music Home Forums PG Music Product Forums Band-in-a-Box for Windows EXCEPTION ERROR - BB 2020 when using XP [Resolved]

Google on upgradng from Windows 7 to Windows 10 using assistive technologies. If any of those conditions apply, you should still be able to upgrade to Windows 10 (from Windows 7 or Windows 8) for free. You will find instructions on what to do to get the upgrade. You can't upgrade from XP or Vista, however. How well it works on your older computer is a different story. Usually, drivers are the problem, but Microsoft does a pretty good job of providing generic drivers for most systems. That may or may not work out for you on a music DAW system that places specific demands on the computer.

Also, you will only get what you currently have. So if you currently have Windows 7 Home, you'll get Windows 10 Home; if you have Windows 7 Professional, you'll get Windows 10 Professional. There is no direct upgrade if you happen to have Windows 7 Enterprise (as Microsoft views that as a corporate version to be upgraded per your Microsoft maintenance agreement).

I just upgraded my laptop from Windows 7 Pro to Windows 10 Pro (I had done it a couple of times in the past, but had issues with the video driver and a few other things). But since Windows 7 is going away and this is a web connected computer, I'm taking the plunge again. It's an almost 10 year old HP first generation i5 Intel processor system with 8 GB RAM and dual 2TB hard drives. So far, this time things seem to be working pretty well, but I still have to figure out how to get HDMI connectivity to work. I've found some workarounds for the video driver issue (that wasn't there before - I guess the passage of time has allowed people to figure things out and post their solutions).

What I did was make sure my Windows 7 system was completely up to date. I updated all my applications. I also have a list of programs that (based on previous upgrade attempts) needed to be de-authorized/de-activated before doing the upgrade, because once upgraded, those apps saw it as a different system and needed re-activation. This required contacting the vendors to explain what I did so they could release a previous activation. This time I knew which apps were affected and just de-activated them before doing the upgrade.

I then made a system image of my hard drive (I use Acronis True Image 2018) and save the image to an external USB hard drive. I have a boot DVD that allows me to restore that image if necessary, should anything with the upgrade go wrong.

I downloaded the ISO image of the Windows 10 installation disk and burned it to DVD. I put the DVD into my computer and while Windows 7 was running, I ran "Setup" from the root folder of that DVD (as I wanted to do an in-place upgrade of my system). The in-place upgrade allows you to keep all your settings, applications, and files intact. About three hours later, I was looking at Windows 10 and so far (this time) things seem to be mostly looking okay). I re-activated the applications. I've tried to run all the major apps I use on a regular basis and everything seems to work pretty well. I'm sure I'll come across some drivers that need updating. I had to re-install my Steinberg eLicenser software (quick and easy) and it immediately recognized my licenses. Interestingly, the iLok license manager worked fine with no re-installation required.

Once I verified everything was working okay, I then took another system image of the computer running Windows 10, so if anything goes haywire, I can at least get back to where I am right now (or worst case, revert back to Windows 7 from the previous image).

Hope this helps.