First, A Little Background
Chances are, if you’ve gotten to this blog, you’ve tried all the usual fixes for this issue. You KNOW your CPU supports the required features (PAE, NX, SSE2) and and yet Windows 10 refuses to install. I recently read a post out there where a user could do a clean install, but could not do the upgrade.
By now, most of us have seen the screen shots of CPU-Z or Coreinfo showing perfectly good CPUs that seemingly cannot upgrade to Windows 10. I, too, have run in to this issue. I have Windows 7 Home Edition (32-bit) running on a Dell D620. For the life of me, I could not get it to upgrade. The CPU is a T7400, which does support all the required features.
I updated my BIOS and even ensured that the NX (no execute bit feature) was enabled in the BIOS.
I’ve checked for the patch that’s supposed to fix this issue, but nothing could get Windows to budge. I’ve messed with scheduled tasks to get the computer to re-evaluate, and yet nothing would change the answer.
DEP (Data Execution Prevention) was the key!
After downloading the Windows 10 DVD and attempting an install – it was a little more specific. It told me, the particular feature missing on my CPU was NX support. I thought, this must be a Dell BIOS bug – but when I rebooted, and attempted a clean install, it complained of nothing of the sort. BUT, I didn’t want to nuke my Windows 7 install as this was my link to my free upgrade license! I also didn’t want to lose all my settings. This got me thinking – what in Windows relies up on NX support? The answer is DEP, or Data Execution Prevention.
So I checked in System Properties > Advanced > Settings. Under ‘Startup and Recovery‘, I found mine was set to:
“Turn on DEP for essential Windows programs and services only”
This setting needs to change to:
“Turn on DEP for all programs and services except those I select”
Another way to enable it, is at the command-line. This does require an elevated (or an administrative command prompt, search for Windows UAC for more information) command prompt to run the following:
bcdedit /set {current} nx AlwaysOn
After a reboot, I was able to upgrade Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 to Windows 10! I used the DVD I downloaded to upgrade rather than trying to make the Windows 10 appraiser re-evaluate my machine.
Happy upgrading.
Hello,
I would like yo thank you very much for your help, it allows me to work around the ‘not compatible’ with windows 10 upgrade problem (due to cpu, i.e. NX/DEP) in my sony vaio VGN-NW11Z.
In my case, the sony vaio BIOS is very limited, and there is no way to set the NX support on it.
Thansk again, I appreciate your help a lot!
have just done as you said but like an idiot i took stick out as it restarting came back with failed on boot now i get the nx display again do i have to reinstall windows 7 again and start over
I guess I don’t understand what you mean “took the stick out” while restarting. I’m guessing you mean the Windows 10 media and thus caused an upgrade failure? It won’t boot to Windows now? What does the screen say exactly?
it said a boot failure i removed the flash drive at present i am wipping my hard drive and will put windows 7 back on ,sp1 and i will do again but will load by disk is there any thing eles i could try
So, there’s one part of this article that may be inaccurate. That is, that you must “upgrade” Windows 7 to Windows 10 to retain your license. As it turns out, an “upgrade” is only necessary if you wish to keep your data / files. I have discovered that Microsoft keeps records of all computers and their licenses and has now converted most every Windows 7 license to what is known as a digital license. If you use the Windows 10 media and perform a clean install and this computer was licensed before by Windows 7, it should automatically be licensed.… Read more »