It would of course help if we knew the specs of your computer such as Make/Model of your laptop. Bottom line, is that if it was built prior to 2006, the hardware will limit it from running W10.
I have updated 6 or more machines that are 8 years old or older, up to 10 years old from XP->W7->W10 and from VISTA->W7->W10. It can be done, but without the exact specs on your laptop, it's going to be iffy. That's another reason to run the
W10 COMPATIBILITY TEST I refer to I my
Post #3 above. You didn't say whether you ran that or not, but it's sounds like you didn't, and your laptop hardware most likely is tool old to pass the test. If you download the free
SPECCY diagnostic from
Link Removed and upload the resulting output text file back here to this thread we can get an exact build date and BIOS date and tell you more specifically. I get the feeling that you're not willing to do that work, and are just going to pull the plug on the upgrade and that's perfectly fine.
But, you are mistaken about the W7->W10 upgrade path. That upgrade is supported just as are W8->W10 and W8.1->W10 upgrades. And that's been for about 2 years now according to Gabe Abul at Microsoft who's in charge of the entire W10 Insider Testing project of which 8 million participants were involved with *including me and several others here at WF*.
If you do some deeper research via Google as well as searching our extensive threads here at WF on the W7/W8x->W10 upgrade process you will see corroboration for my statement. I also started several of these threads while being a tester and out of necessity for Clients who would bring their failed W7 or W8x machines that died during one of these upgrades.
The other limiting factor besides the build date of your laptop's Motherboard and CPU chip is whether the laptop was built during the XP-era; from 2001-2006. Experientially, I was able to prove that machines built during the cutoff year or just before 2006 and earlier that have Microsoft stickers on them that say XP installed;
"Vista-Compatible" or
"Vista-Ready" appear to take a W10 upgrade in all cases tested.
I have multiple machines that work in this fashion. If the laptop doesn't have either of these stickers on them or the stickers were pulled off, most likely they will never run the W7->W10 upgrade.
We have recently garnered independent confirmation from a number of sources outside of WF such as Microsoft Community Forum who corroborate our findings. Feel free to do the searches.
Reading through the W10 upgrade license mumbo-jumbo you will also find that Microsoft does indeed fully support the W10 upgrades on all computers that
"...were manufactured during or after the "Modern Era". Microsoft further defines computers built in the
"Modern Era" as all computers manufactured in 2009 or later. It's right there in there licenses and press releases back to Sep. 2014.
I threw this Post up for others experiencing W10 upgrade failures on older laptops as well as desktops to not take that statement you made at face value. Just because it didn't work on your machine, doesn't mean it won't work on other machines built around the same time. Since we don't have your
EXACT build date of your laptop, we can't say for certain that you W7->W10 upgrade will not work, but, we can say conclusively that it was designed to work and I have performed the upgrade on multiple test machines of my own as well as several Client computers too.
FYI.
Best of luck,
<<<BBJ>>>