My Windows 10 convoluted upgrade path

Just wondering if anyone who has taken a similar path as mine and then later did a clean install and what did they find in terms of improvement if any.
 
I started with Vista 64 on this machine. Upgraded over Vista with Windows 8 Pro and later 8.1 Pro. Then I installed Windows 10 Pro over top of Win 8.1. My findings are the DAW held up fine through all of those OS iterations even though most every piece of advice I found pointed to clean installs for both Win 8 and 10. I just didn't have the time to reload everything at that time. In summary, all my various daws and plugins work fine, I'm enjoying buffer sizes of 32 and 64 for even my latest project that has a liberal amount of unfrozen melodye tracks and lots of VST's and VSTi's. It's close to 50 tracks at this point with no hiccups at those low buffer settings.
 
For the most part this stellar Jim Roseberry computer has amazingly stood the test of time since 2009. Hat's off to my friend Jim.
 
Worry area: I do occasionally see random 50% spikes across all of the threads that will stay elevated for about 30 seconds even when it's Idling. That's the only thing going on that makes me think I should dig in for 2-3 days to reload from scratch. With Windows 10, I think I can simply reset to factory state and it will be as a fresh install.  Any thoughts from the crew?
 
 
Thanks,

Thanks for posting your experiences. I agree with you. It's the echos of hearing I need a clean install and upgrade over a previously installed OS at your own risk kind of advice. For me here, my daw runs like a champ for the most part and the upgrade was so much less time consuming. I didn't mention this in the first post, but I also changed out the MB/CPU/Ram and windows 10 booted right up with only a few software licenses needing attention. Thanks to fireberd here on the forum for his good advice for that change. That is probably what got me wondering more about my upgrade path again.

When you've got a block of down time, do an "upgrade install" making sure to save and migrate nothing.
This is essentially a clean install... but you won't have to chase down your install key.
You can then use Disk Cleanup to remove remnants of the prior OS install.
 
These types of issues are why you want to perform a clean install.
It's not that you're guaranteed to have problems... but you leave that door open.
The registry is a mess from remnants of OS past.  

I have both my production Win 10 Pro and also on a separate SSD the Win 10 Pro Insider Preview edition which was a "clean" install.  Visually, I see no difference on how fast they boot up or operation.  There is very little installed on the Insider edition (Sonar and MS Office 365, the driver and software for my MOTU 896mk3 Hybrid and a couple of utilities)  but there is still no "visible" difference on opening or running programs.