Windows 10: Reinstall: product key blocked?

Normally, you have to have Windows 7sp1 installed to upgrade.

The only thing you need to do, is check which version you have. (32/64-bit)

Starter, Home Basic & Home Premium upgrade to Windows 10 Home.
Professional & Ultimate upgrade to Windows 10 Pro.

And also the language of your Windows 7. (You can only upgrade to the same language.)

If you account for all of this, you don't need the Get Windows 10 icon. Just use the Media Creation Tool to download the ISO you need and then you do the upgrade with this. Again, first running setup.exe from Windows 7 and afterwards you can do a clean install, if needed.

 

Yep, I have SP1! Is an upgrade a recommended method of install? This is my main PC which I use for a lot of work so if it's unstable I'm worried it'll cause problems. Fresh install means so much reinstallation of software though *Sleepy

 

Depends on the stability of your current OS. The thing I always do is, I make an image of my OS harddisk before upgrading to a new OS. If anything goes wrong in the first week, I can always go back to my previous OS. (I prefer this methode instead of doing a reverse inside the new OS itself. Probably, both methods are okay, but putting an image back is always better, in my opinion.)

Anyway, to get your Windows 10 activated, you always need to do the upgrade first. You can then test your installation and if anything isn't working properly, you have two choices. Or you go straight back to the image you made, or you bite the bullet, and do a fresh install and reinstall all the programs you need.

I know, the last option is a lot of work, but in the end, you get a freshly installed system that should keep you happy for years to come.

At this moment, our household has 6 systems running. 3 of them are running Windows 10 as an upgrade, and 2 of them as a freshly installed version, 1 is still running Windows Vista. The 3 upgrades I did were 2 Windows 8.1 Pro versions, and 1 Windows 7 Starter. All of them are running fine, after I tweaked it with the drivers that worked best with them. *Wink Only my main desktop PC and a HP ProBook has all new Windows 10 drivers. For the others, I needed to use Windows 8 or even 7 drivers to have it properly working.

All of this to say, an upgrade is always the first option you have to do. You don't have a choice. After this, you can test if everything is working like it should, and if it is, you don't have to do anything else. But make sure you have an image of you harddisk, so you can always go back if anything goes wrong.