Windows 10: Free W10 upgrade

LOL yeah I saw that *chuckle.

 

To get the free Win10 I've only Upgraded over activated/running Win7 and Win8.1 computers, after that a clean install seem to work fine as for the activation as long as I was connected to the 'net. I have done a few WinXP computers by first Upgrading to Win7 then to Win10, didn't take more than a couple extra hours.

 

Thank you slicedice and others for your good advice, but a miracle has happened, I was about to restore it back to W7, had my ISO ready, but then decided to check settings and ..... Windows is activated with digital license.

-BBDS

 

Awesome!

Glad you got it sorted out!

 

The activation servers sometimes take their time getting round to issuing a license. As I recall, back in Aug. 2015 when I took the free upgrade it took a couple of hours before activation happened.

 

Didn't Microsoft only offer free upgrades from Windows 7 Ultimate to Windows 10 Pro for a short period of time and then stopped it?

I had registered my interest in the free upgrade from W7Ux64 to W10Px64 before it was released and I upgraded after the time period had expired. I was on the phone to MS for over an hour as they kept telling me that I was no longer eligible for it, then the bloke spoke to his supervisor and low and behold his supervisor told him to allow me to activate. I was instructed to download the Windows 10 Setup installer package or MediaCreationTool from a URL they gave me. The version of that setup was 10.0.14393.0.

 

I have an Acer Aspire One AO533 Intel Atom N455 circa 09/10 with Win7 Starter and a couple of weeks ago I attempted an upgrade using the Win7 Starter keys and the Upgrade proceeded without any problems and upgraded it to Win10 Home 32. I just replaced the HHD to a WD 3D NAND 1TB and did a clean install without keys and it activated. I also have a purchased 32/64 Home,Pro,Education key and for the heck of it tried Pro and Home 64 bit with my RAM maxed out at 2GB and it is about the same slothyness as 32 Home so I left the 64 in and presently am dual booting 7&10. It took me this long to upgrade because I felt 10 would be too demanding on this little Atombomb Netbook and even now the Win 7 keys still worked. Realistically Win10S might be better but I don't know due to difficulties getting it!

 

Thanks for posting this information about Starter Edition.

How's your "Atombomb" *chuckle running Windows 10? Smooth ride?

 

Very stable with better graphics but being dual boot I still use 7 and 10 is a disappointment with how damn "appy" it makes this netbook appear! It's a computer not a smart phone!!!

Also as some have asked between Home and Pro, Pro gives you a bit more control on what you can enable or disable and an example of this is for updates, software is fed out of your box back into the line like BitTorrent. There is much unwanted crap running in the background and don't get me wrong about 7 as I never liked how much of a pig it is! I hated Vista because it brought my socket 939 down to a snails pace and 7 is just a sweeter tasting lemon!

We or should I say Microsoft is dropping the ball on what customers want and by this I mean there are many Linux flavours that are extremely lite and more are becoming this way. Take my Acer at originally 1gb of Ram and the N455 always had the blue circle of sloth as I call it forcing me to upgrade the RAM to 2 gb which is max so the story goes. This reduced the sloth circle a bit and the SSD helped some more. Win 10 is like what it used to be. I could purchase a newer netbook or laptop but why should I have to??

This Acer is gently used and still looks brand new. Back to the Linux lite, one fellow was walking into our local recycle depot which is obviously getting newer and better hardware than I have with an HP OmniBook XE3 in mint condition but the battery is shot.

Anyway he gave it to me instead of letting it get busted up and scrapped. It is mint but it has a PIII 800 with 128 megs of RAM and a massive 28gb HHD. Anyway let's test it and it works fine with Windows 2000 Pro but let's try the same hardware with Puppy Linux 4.3.1. Well it was slow but extremely stable in the "live" format because the entire system is running in 128 megs of RAM!

Well I figured why do I want to run a puter on a thumb drive so I partitioned th HD and set up a substantial Swap partition to use as RAM and directly installed 4.3.1 on the HD giving a fighting chance. What a difference considering that the 2002 HD is a 4500 RPM instead of 5400 or 7200 but it performs amazing with smooth fast boot, run, and shutdown. Yes it is somewhat of a snail compared to 2018 but THINK of what Puppy would do on the Acer? In that case the puppy would be a Greyhound. I can also use a newer fancier version as well.

I hung onto XP til the bitter end and 7 is going this way as well but instead of making things more efficient we are forced to throw away money and hardware! Microsoft mentions that Win10 Pro and Education are eligible for 10S so okay let's install Pro on the Acer and install the installation tool as I did. Much time passed and after all of this, all it did was update my early ISO I used to install Win 10 with my purchased Pro,Home,education key to the latest version of Pro. Pretty sad wanting to downgrade at the expense of Pro to 10S and still stuck with bloat!

If you want an education look at the NLite forums and forums of other ISO mod software and see how much they are stripping out in anger. And then there is the software designed to make 10 look like 7. One program I believe is called Decrapifier. Because of what is happening I will leave 7&10 on my Acer and install a Linux Lite version on my 3rd partition of my newly installed SSD and attempt to learn the CLI as another option.

 

@hennmann

Hahah, yes I understand how you feel and agree with most (if not all) of what you just said. *Wink


But I've learned to live with Win10 and won't be returning back to 7 nor XP. Linux however is a completely different story. Possible to setup a µLinux distro taking about 10MB HDD space and 32MB of RAM. Do that with Windows. Not even Win10 IoT can get even close to that. And then there are OSes that fit on a single 1.44" floppy and can run full Desktop environment with web browsers and all (well the browser takes up an additional floppy, but who cares) *Smile

 

I used to have a 286 with Win 3.1 and the HD was in megs not gigs. The Linux CLI sent me running at 90 miles per hour with my hair on fire and to the point of using Hackintosh on my Dell Dimention 4600 but then I figured why waste time with perpetual patch and hope and a damn proprietary CLI on closed source UNIX based OS and just use better free Linux and learn it as well and leave Windows on another partition for the few things that cannot be run properly on Linux until I fully understand Linux and use it as my primary OS. If Windows doesn't listen to what their customers want find alternatives is the way I feel now. It looks like Microsoft is following the mentality of Apple where to keep things "Legal" you must pay 3-4 times for hardware.

 

Not quite, what Microsoft did was announce that the offer had ended. Their FAQ now says...

https://support.microsoft.com/help/1...10-upgrade-faq
...the wording is peculiarly specific, referring just to the Get Windows 10 app.

What was found in practice was that if you upgrade a qualifying Windows 7 or 8 using the ISO or USB install media the activation servers would still give it a digital entitlement after that date. After an upgrade to get activation you could then do a clean install which would also activate. Starting with the Anniversary Update (the next version after your 14393) you could skip the upgrade and enter the key of your qualifying Win7/8 during a clean install to get a (now renamed) digital licence.

Whether this was deliberate or accidental on Microsoft's part is open to debate. Reports as recently as last month show that an upgrade still gets a digital licence. I suspect they quietly left the door open to get as many as possible to migrate to Windows 10.

 

Ugh !!!

Now the link doesn`t say download the Fall Creators Update anymore, but yet it doesn`t say download the Spring Creators Update either.

Eye Yi Yi, what is going on with MS *Confused

 

Actually that is a good thing. They must be going to release the SCU on the 10th. I for one would be mad as hell if I didn't know of the timing and release dates of these.... having downloaded and installed clean the FCU just <48 hours from the drop of the SCU.

 

Ya, I upgrade using the Iso file method, and I always wait at least 4 to 6 months.

I`m sure it`ll have the proper description soon.