Free Windows Upgrades Still In Effect for Win 7 & 8

Good question. The answer will be known soon.

Free upgrade is still working today.

Hope I am not too late will upgrade tonight. Ty

I did it! I installed W10 and my W7 installation is safe and sound. And it was pretty fast. No more than 30 mins.

I downloaded the W10 ISO from MS, burned it to a USB stick with a tiny utility called Rufus and booted from it. There I selected 'Custom', selected where to install, clicked 'Next', and sat back while W10 was installed!

There are a two main ways to get the W10 ISO ftom MS:

  1. Directly from the MS's Download Windows 10 site. Follow the instructions here. BTW, that explains what to do in Chrome/Edge/IE. In Firefox just skip hitting F12 and then Ctrl+Shift+M. Hit Ctrl+Shift+M right away. Or download directly from Microsoft using the menus at the WZT site. Or use the Download tool at HeiDoc.net site. Or download from MS by changing your browser's UA.

  2. Directly from the MS's Download Windows 10 site using the Media Creation Tool

With the 1st method the Windows image is a WIM file (uncompressed). With the 2nd method the Windows image is an ESD file (compressed). I downloaded 64-bit versions of W10, and with the 1st method the ISO was a tad over 5GB, while with the 2nd method the ISO was a tad below 4GB.

EDIT: Nirsoft's tiny ProduKey can show the product key just in case you need it

Clean install or upgrade with existing programs upgraded?

Mine worked with the media creation tool to upgrade. Easy to do.

Clean install!

The MCT was a bit uncooperative in W7 for me. It insisted I sign in as an admin. Running it with admin privileges wasn't enough for some reason. I liked this method best:

BTW, I was never asked for a product key (because it is embedded in the BIOS). Nirsoft's tiny ProduKey can show it, or retrieve it if it's not in the BIOS.

You were never asked for a product key because that computer's Mac address and hardware specs are associated with that installation of Windows on Microsoft's servers.

Is the free upstate still available past Jan. 14?

Hard to find current info on that front, but here is something from 2 days ago--fwiw.

yes, all these still work::

https://www.nthcircle.com/forum/general/3014-free-windows-upgrades-still-in-effect-for-win-7-8?start=20#42870

PS. Can I have the RedPoket's rep login so I can go post this on every thread in the front page?

:stuck_out_tongue:

st3fx, thanks for that video on recovering my Windows password. Turns out the video was for Win7 while I had Win8, so it didn't work - but I was so inspired by your video that I searched some more and recovered my password using a Linux LiveCD.

So thanks to nthcircle and the wonderful folks here, my Windows laptop is now upgraded to Windows10. (Not that I plan on using Windows any day soon, but a free upgrade was hard to pass up!)