Windows Upgrade Experience–HP Probook 4520s with VeraCrypt
The end of this article has suggestions on resolving shutdown/sleep problems on the HP Probook 4520s.
My HP 4520s (Intel i5 that was new in winter of 2011) laptop runs Windows 7 Professional and is encrypted with VeraCrypt 1.0-f–Windows 7 Professional does not have Bitlocker as part of the feature set. My initial limited research showed that I could upgrade in place, but the upgrade process failed during the reboot/install phase. It prompted for rebooting into the old operating system which it did without incident. I then waited a couple of weeks and did some more research, which indicated both that I probably needed to upgrade to VeraCrypt 1.16 and perhaps decrypt the drive before the upgrade. Upgrading to VeraCrypt 1.16 did not break anything, but attempting to upgrade on the encrypted drive still failed.
After decrypting the drive (about 3.5 hours), the Windows 10 upgrade went smoothly (about an hour). After the upgrade, everything appears to work fine, but the battery drain in sleep mode is much faster than normal at the moment. The system definitely performs much better after the upgrade. Figures 1 and 2 show the messages that you will get if you try to do the upgrade without decrypting a Veracrypt boot drive before the upgrade. Figure 3 shows the time estimate for decrypting the VeraCrypt boot drive, and Figure 4 shows the beginning of the upgrade process after decrypting the boot drive.
Messages from Attempt to Upgrade without Decrypting
Ongoing Problems with Power Management, Sleep and Shutdown
This machine is generally much faster than before the upgrade to Windows 10; it had become almost unusably slow even after a format/reinstall. It is now quite usable.
Power management is an ongoing problem with this laptop. It frequently wakes up from sleep while the lid is closed and then runs the battery down. Virus scans and the other actions recommended by HP have thus far been unsuccessful.
The machine also developed a problem where it would neither shutdown nor sleep. The HP web site has an article on how to fix shutdown/sleep problems but none of these worked on the Probook 4520s, as it apparently uses earlier versions of drivers. There were no updated drivers on the HP site, nor were there updated drivers that would install on the Intel web site. Strangely, the Cygwin shutdown -r +0, shutdown --suspend +0 and shutdown -h +0 commands all work properly to restart, suspend, and shutdown the computer properly. I have no idea why the Windows user interface alternatives do not work. The shutdown command is not part of the base Cygwin install–you have to manually select it.