if the documents and photos I have saved on my hard drive will be accessible when I upgrade to Win10? ~ or do I need to put it all on a thumb drive?

Sooz

No problem at all. No thumb drive needed.

Thanks! ~ I'm creeping closer to taking the plunge ~

Did you work out your problems with Win10 or did you revert back?

Sooz

I had no problems with my documents etc. but I guess Win10 doesn't like my upgraded and upgraded and upgraded computer so I moved whatever I could and was worth keeping away from my C drive, saved my profile etc, and did a clean install of win7.
Maybe I'm getting to old for all that fancy stuff of win10. Most of that stuff isn't useful to me and by the time you manually disable all their privacy invasion crap I might as well stay with win7 for the time being.

One of the chief differences I've learned about Win 10 from previous Windows versions is that all programs run in their own memory allocation. Just exactly what that means isn't entirely clear to me but the result is that I have been able to run some old programs from Win 95 (!) flawlessly. I have an old version of Lightwave that I got in '97 and it works perfectly, where I was having issues with it in Win 7 and Win 8.1.