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,

when i done all my pc's, back when windows 10 was releaqsed, most of them were in place upgrades from windows 7 pro and/or windows 7 home (or whatever it was), i done 1 clean install from a retail purchased windows 10. i have seen absolutely zero difference between the in place upgrades and the clean install, whether it be performance, comparability, stability or what have you. if i was to give anyone advice i would say go the in place upgrade route first, it will save you a lot of time and effort, and if like my experience everything goes fine well you're laughing. if something did go a stray, well you have only lost an hour or 2. from what i have read in place upgrades have gone well for most people, of course with all the variable with hardware and software etc there are no guaranties, if i had to do it again i would certainly go the in place upgrade route, the time and effort saving is huge (depending on how much stuff you have to install i guess) for me it would have been days/week(s), not to mention the almost zero downtime, the in place upgrades for me were fast and painless.

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.

I did an in place upgrade from Win 8.1 Pro to Win 10 Pro with the "free" upgrade.  No problem other than I had to reauthorize a couple of plug ins.  DPC Latency Mon program shows no problems, and I don't have any issues with Sonar (or any other application). 
 
There have been issues with upgrading an OS in earlier Windows versions, but from my experience Microsoft got it right with the upgrading to Win 10, as long as the user's hardware is compatible.  I do some PC support and all my clients that upgraded had no problems.  I've seen postings of problems with the upgrade on the Win 10 forums but many of those appear to either be incompatible (or marginally compatible) hardware and software or "self inflicted" problems. 
 
As a side note, I upgraded my hardware (built a new PC) back around the 1st of December.  I used my OS SSD from the old hardware (the OS SSD also has Sonar installed on it).  Booted the new hardware with the old SSD and Windows automatically installed any needed hardware drivers.  As I had "digital entitlement" for Windows 10 it automatically activated it for the new hardware.  Again, because of the new hardware a couple of plug ins needed to be reauthorized - the only thing on the new PC.
 
 

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'm glad someone asked this question as I been thinking the same thing. In the past with Xp I was a huge fan of when things get sluggish and weird, pull the Hard drive, put a fresh ( usually bigger) drive in and fresh install. There was always a huge improvement in performance. 
 
I did the in place upgrades on my office and my DAW machines,They are ..OK.. but in November I was given an i7 HP desktop and to tune it up I put in an SSD drive and a fresh install of W10. It is noticeably way faster and very responsive. All 3 computers have the same SSD drives and 16 GB of RAM, the only difference would be the processors. An i3 and i5 and the i7. The i5 is my DAW and has become the one I find always hanging up and takes the longest to boot. I'm not talking about using Sonar, I'm just talking about slow to boot, slow to settle down slow to open web pages etc. 
So I'm in the mood for a fresh install on my DAW just to perk it up. 
While I'm at it I can upgrade the OS SSD which is 3 years old now and another habit of mine was keeping OS dives fresh. 
 

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.
 
 

Jim Roseberry
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.  

 
Thanks for your suggestion Jim. I may do that at some point. It's mainly the Vista remnants hiding in there that worry me.