W10 upgrade from W7 starter

[xwb]

I thought free upgrades were gone except for the assistive technologies upgrade.

I decided to put Windows 7 starter on my experimental laptop to try something out. Could have done it with a VM but VMs are way too slow for all the C# stuff. Anyway, it went through its update stuff and to my surprise, it offered a free upgrade to W10. Doesn't do that on the W7 Home or W7 Pro version.

 

[2ffat]

Hmm. Lucky you. Be sure to read the fine print, though.


James P. Cottingham
I'm number 1,229!
I'm number 1,229!

 

[xwb]

I'll try it on a VM and see what it does.

 

[dbMark]

A year ago I had a Windows 10 install fail going from Windows 7 (update from XP version) to Windows 10. It just endlessly rebooted. I set it aside for months. Recently I asked a high school neighbor kid to get Windows 10 on it. In short, what he did was to download Microsoft's latest Windows 10 ISO installation (Media Creation Tool on to a USB stick). He ran it twice, the second time was so he could selectively remove the archived folders holding the original Windows files.

I also had a laptop from a relative that I had been unable to upgrade due to the known issue of some Win7 systems getting stuck in "Searching for updates". Well, he used the USB stick on that too and he bypassed that and quickly installed Windows 10 there too.

My conclusion is that Microsoft really, really wants genuine Windows users to move to Windows 10. Even if they won't say so in writing.

 

[rclarke250]

the servers at Microsoft for upgrades are still open. I just built a computer and had a Windows 8 key, to upgrade to 8.1 I used the volume lic. key from the Ed Bott StoryMicrosoft website, (Microsoft tells you to use for the upgrade to 8.1) Then I tried windows 10 and it installed and said registered. This has been covered by Cnet and a few other outlets.

 

[flyboytim]

It's fairly clear now that Windows is continuing to be freely distributed, and MS wants the userbase to pay only for the hardware and services that are offered by them, and their OEM partners.
By ignoring what was once considered piracy, they have just entrained the more curious users who don't want to pay for retail software above the few $ that an OEM puts on the price of a new PC, as beta testers, on what is a continuous rollout of upgrades to their single core based OS.
Natural attrition will kill off older Windows versions and the legacy hardware built to run them, and there is also a push in MS strategy to leverage developers of other OS types, notably Linux, to use Windows tools (on Windows 10) for development and testing.
One ring to rule them all...