(shrug) I prefer to be cautious and try to reduce possibility something can go wrong. One of the reasons why I tend to avoid in-place upgrade due to concern over the "baggage" (e.g. remnants of programs that may not have been completely uninstalled -- registry keys, DLLs, EXEs, hidden folders, etc.) that tends to accumulate over time in Windows (and often related to how the person might be operating the computer) which may either interfere with the upgrade (in the worst case) or simply gets carried over and you inherit "quirky" behavior and possibly can bite you sometime in the future. I've had to deal with an occasional user who is in the habit of installing (random) software and then uninstalling improperly (by deleting the program folder), as well as plugging/unplugging USB devices willy-nilly (on occasion I'd seen several mice and keyboards plugged into the computer).

>Windows 10 was extensively tested with in-place upgrade. I've heard of only a handful of issues with upgrading in-place.
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>>I've learned over the years that it's generally best to do an OS upgrade *before* you start installing much software -- especially stuff like antivirus. OS upgrades also have a better chance of succeeding if you start with a fairly "vanilla" configuration by switching to generic drivers rather than those specific to the hardware you're using (s the specific drivers might not be immediately available in the standard install). That being said, you might have more success starting with a clean install of Windows 7, then upgrading it to Windows 10, following that with installation of whatever software you're going to use -- effectively starting with a "new" computer and upgrading the OS.