Choosing between a clean install and an in-place upgrade when moving to a new Windows version affects both the migration effort and the long-term health of the installation.
In-Place Upgrade
- Pro: Keeps apps, files, and settings — minimal immediate disruption
- Con: Carries forward years of accumulated cruft — leftover drivers, registry bloat, orphaned services from long-uninstalled software
Clean Install
- Pro: A genuinely fresh, minimal system — often noticeably snappier, especially on a machine that’s been upgraded in-place multiple times over the years
- Con: Requires reinstalling every application and manually restoring settings and files from backup
# Before a clean install, export a list of currently installed apps for reference Get-AppxPackage | Select Name, Version | Export-Csv apps-list.csv winget export -o winget-packages.json
A reasonable rule of thumb: if a machine has been through two or more in-place major version upgrades without ever being wiped, a clean install is genuinely worth the reinstallation effort — the accumulated cruft from repeated upgrades is a real, if hard to quantify, source of instability.