I have an EVGA GTX 580 video card, and either Windows or its driver has a bug. When my computer wakes up after sleeping just about any game I play will crash. It doesn’t happen right away, usually I can start a 5v5 dota match and the game will crash in the middle of a draft; if it’s ability draft, usually just as it is my turn to pick abilities(thus forcing me to have randomly selected abilities). No big deal, just go disable sleep, and hibernation for good measure.

What if you happen to be reinstalling windows frequently, but don’t want to manually configure this? Well you’re gonna have to create a batch file to do it. Well there is a hitch in this plan, and that’s the powercfg is designed rather ridiculously. Apparently it uses entirely GUIDs, which are rather long and difficult to memorize (more so than your windows product key). So what’s a person to do?

Last week I had finally had enough of it. You know that feeling you get when you have been running the same installation of Windows for too long? Even if the system isn’t slow, it still feels bloated and dirty.. you know? I have a 32GB SSD installed, and it had everything on it. When I first installed Windows 10 I found out the hard way that half the system would break if you moved around directories and created junctions. That is how I used to move my Users and Program Files to other drives, I even made batch scripts to help the process. I had a script to robocopy the directories and then put down junctions to their new locations. I had a couple other setup scripts I ran as well. None of them were any good to me now though, which was a shame because I just made them before getting Windows 10. I used them a total of 1 times.

So, I thought to myself, how will I make a Windows 10 clean install easier?

I’ve been running Windows 10 since July, and I like it. I performed an in place upgrade for both of my computers, so I thought it was high time I did a clean install. I had tried in the past, but I could never get past the activation. It was hard finding information to explicitly say how to clean install windows 10 with a windows 7 ultimate product key.

After a failed clean install with an older version from July. I ended up calling Microsoft Support, they were fairly clueless; probably a situation of the left hand not knowing what the right hand has done. I did acquire one very useful piece of information however, and for the sake of search engines I will spell it out explicitly for you.

To activate your Windows 10 clean installation with a Windows 7 Product Key, you must use and install Windows 10 Build 1511.