I had heard that Microsoft quietly reinstated free Windows 10 upgrades, sometime last year. My guess is that it's in anticipation of the end of life for Windows 7 that's coming up this month.
An 85 year old lady that I help out was hoping that Windows 7 would outlive her so she wouldn't have to learn how to use another operating system-- but apparently she's just too darn healthy.
I did a straight upgrade of her computer today, after downloading the media creation tool, and it worked great and activated automatically.
If you've been holding out you should probably go ahead and git 'er done.
Just Google "Windows 10 Media Creation Tool" and download it from the Microsoft website. It's small-- less than 20MB.
Then you can either upgrade, in place, or create a bootable USB flash drive to install a clean copy. In either case it will download the correct installation files.
If you upgrade it will automatically activate without entering a product key.
If you do a clean install it may or may not ask for a product key. If it does ask you can enter your Windows 7 or 8 product key and it will work.
It will automatically install Home or Professional, based on what you're upgrading from.
Thanks Chelle. Yes, with the media creation tool you can still update to 10 for free. And that may come in handy now. I haven't kept up with all the 7 updates either. I was just curious as to how they work size wise. No big deal. Just curiosity!
You probably have until the 14th of this month to get the free update to W10. If you don' t update you'll be running an unsupported, unsecured system, if that is not the case already. And you will have to pay for W10 after the 14th, I assume.
Is there a way to recover my Windows password - when I don't have access to Windows on any other machine? Thanks for any help.
(I searched, and found this - How to create a Windows 7 password reset disk - CNET But "reset password" needs me to have a previously-created "reset password drive" - which I don't have. And Parted Magic needs me to have access to Windows - which I am locked out of, since I don't remember my password).
So I guess my question becomes - is there any way to get into Windows using Linux if you have forgotten your Windows password? Many thanks if you can solve this sticky problem for me!
So, will the W7 license change to a W10 license and you'll lose the W7 license, or will the W7 license become a W7-&-W10 license? I try to see if I can install W10 to a new partition and leave W7 as it is.
Here's another path to upgrade from W7 to W10 that one can walk away from while your pc is upgrading. I wouldn't try this method if one's W7 is dual booting with another OS, for you pc will likely not reboot automatically, as the article states, during the upgrade.
Win, Win For M$
With 1/3 (lots of millions) of the world's PCs still running on Windows 7, and it's free support from Microsoft ending today, there will be millions paid by businesses and the like to M$ for continued support of W7 as well as millions spent buying W10 or a new PC with W10 on it. Pretty good haul for Microsoft in the coming days, I would say.
