Another question.  Is anyone successfully running Acronis 2010 on Win 8.1?  That's the version I've got and use on my two Win 7 machines.  I'm hoping I can use it to capture a disk image of the laptop before trying the OS upgrade.  I'm not especially looking to buy the latest version if that could be avoided.

Just create a True Image rescue disk. You then boot off it and then it runs it off Linux :)

I updated 2 laptops from 8.1 to 10, 1 desktop from 7 to 10 and my studio desktop from 7 Pro to 10 Pro and didn't have any issue with any of them.