Microsoft is Silently Preloading Windows 10 release
If you registered for the Windows 10 upgrade you will receive a notice if and when you can download and update to the new OS. However many end-users now report a new hidden directory in their Windows install. It seems that Microsoft is pre-loading Windows 10 already.
Now first let me make it clear that this does not apply to all end-users who registered for the upgrade through the Windows icon in the taskbar. However if you want to check it out yourself, look for the following directory on your Windows installation: $windows.~BT
You will notice it's roughly 6GB in size, and it holds primary data for the Windows 10 upgrade. I just verified this myself from the laptop I am typing the this news-post from. The map is hidden, so in explorer make sure that you enable 'show hidden items'. If you have the directory, leave it alone and do not click setup would be my recommendation. Users worldwide are reporting that if you start the install, files still could be missing causing an install error.
Windows 10 will be released Wednesday in 190 countries and 111 languages. Microsoft promises a free upgrade to Windows 10 for Windows 7- and Windows 8.1 users under the condition that you upgrade within a year.
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Senior Member
Posts: 19503
Joined: 2010-04-21
MS changed activation for 10 (For the free upgrade anyway), so long as you were genuine 7 or 8.1 before the upgrade, then your machines hardware ID & genuine status was sent and saved on MS servers, so when you reinstall 10 cleanly, it sends the machines Hardware ID back to their activation servers, it sees you were genuine before the upgrade, and activates your machine again
Many people, including myself on my main machine Im typing from, have done that fine
Senior Member
Posts: 4019
Joined: 2008-09-07
I have never seen these types of download speeds for anything else...

Member
Posts: 26
Joined: 2013-01-31
i wouldn't expect this silent pre-install , the right move should have been to notify the end user and give the choice to download or not
This makes me wonder how many stuff is being supervised "silently" in our systems....
Junior Member
Posts: 18
Joined: 2014-10-23
Seems weird. When i attempted to do a clean install of windows 8.1 , i got an error because i didn't have a product key for them, so the only way was to install windows 8, then upgrade to 8.1 via store. I hope that's the case because going through 3 OS installs just to get the "cleanest" possible install would be very time consuming.