Then it will reboot if you like it or not.

In reply to a post by ian72:

So, either reboot and see what happens or start deleting stuff and risk borking windows when it may not even be doing the win 10 update anyway.

I decided to see what happened, so clicked to Restart. Very weird from then on.

First it gave me a previously never seen message about some processes running, so wait. Then it continued with the "Restarting" blue screen.

Next the screen went blank, as normal, followed by the ASUS splash page coming up. That hung around for a bit, then I got the stage 1 desktop screen with the shortcuts and so on, plus most of the Taskbar stuff. At this point the disc drive was going like the clappers, and the clock in the System Tray stopped. Netmeter window had come up, but zilch happening in it.

Cursor arrow very occasionally did the rotating circle, and when moved to the taskbar immediately circled. Nothing clickable.

That stayed the same for around 7 minutes, with a couple of blankings and reinstatements of the entire taskbar!

Ultimately refreshed the desktop a couple of times and now seems to be normal.

Nothing appears to have altered in the $Windows.~BT directory, including the timestamps.

The squashed rectangles Get Win10 icon has re-appeared amongst the hidden ones!

A totally strange episode, taking about 20 minutes from clicking the "Restart to complete the install".

Thanks to all for their suggestions. At least I can turn the darn thing off now without worrying about what will happen when I turn it on . Or can I !?!! . We shall see.

The danger of touch pads, I've never liked them, use a mouse wherever possible.

Yes, I've been caught a few times.

I used to turn off the click function of the pad itself, but my last two laptops including the one that I just had the panic about have been touch-screen. Turn of the pad-click and you lose the touchscreen .

I think there is a slight difference between the ASUS and this Dell as to what gets disabled, but in both cases it defeats the object of having a touch-screen.

If it does upgrade to Windows 10 you have 30 days to uninstall back to your original OS. It saves the old version in c:\windows.old. After 30 days windows will delete the option. It's called Windows Rollback.
Rolling back is as simple as opening the Settings menu, choosing Update and Security, then picking the Recovery option. Choose Go Back to Windows 8.1 / 7, depending on your original operating system, and Windows will begin the rollback procedure.
Do a search on Google for "Windows Rollback" to get more info.

Brilliant Roger . Thanks a lot.

You've probably now seen the issue has gone away, but I've been considering doing the actual upgrade to see what it's like and how it copes with various things I do on my main laptop. That's why in the end I bit the bullet and restarted just before 7 this evening. I wasn't aware of the roll-back facility.

I'd like to upgrade, but it's early days for something so major. I've been in the business longer than most on these forum have been alive, and early adopters easily come a cropper. But from what you say I shall probably go ahead on Thursday. Something I keep trying to get done I have a chance of tomorrow.

One thing I've observed is that Microsoft roll-backs normally work . Apart from System Restore.

The target machine isn't critical except for the various flavours of thinkbroadband speedtests. IIRC, (possibly not! I may be thinking of tbbMeter), one doesn't yet work properly/at all under Win10.

I want the HTML5 HTTP single-streamer working on 13 August when I move away from Plusnet, and I can't use this machine as in my eagerness for a decent SSD-only laptop I didn't spot this one doesn't have Ethernet! D'oh! (I'd have bought it anyway, but it was a shock).

Edited by RobertoS (Tue 04-Aug-15 21:38:36)

I've upgraded 6 PCs of different specs from 8.1 to Windows 10 so far and all but one went without a hitch. The odd one generated the error "unable to update the system reserved partition" during the early part. That was due to the system reserved partition only being 100mb. Easily fixed using the free Aoemi Partition Assistant to increase it to 350mb. Windows 8/8.1 always used that size but Windows 7 used 100mb. Can always check it 1st using Windows disk management. As long as it wasn't an upgrade from Windows 7, it will be ok.

That's interesting about Windows 7 Reserved partition, my 2 W7 systems are of course 100MB, a useful tip to increase them to 400MB (or so) beforehand.

When you got the error message did the upgrade fail, giving you the chance to increase the partition or what?

It just terminated the upgrade during the initial checks and then rolled back the few things that it has already started. Didn't cause any problems. I then used Aomei to decrease the front end of the C drive by approx 350mb and extended the system partition by the same amount. Restarted the upgrade and away it went. Looking on the web it seems that this is not an unusual problem and also occurred on Win 8 upgrades from Win7. Strange MS didn't find away to resize the partition automatically during the upgrade! There are going to be many non technical users who wouldn't know or understand how to resize it. Not a task for the faint hearted if you are not IT savvy.

I've changed partition sizes several times on this particular PC, I'm not overly concerned about doing it again.