The free upgraded versions are digital entitlements, yes. If you buy win10 standalone, you get a real key.
I have Windows 10 on my PC, upgraded from Windows 7. If I were to get a new motherboard and CPU, before or after July 29th, would I need to buy a new standalone copy of Windows 10?
Thanks
Before July 29, you can just use your win7 key to activate it.
After July 29, assuming they don’t extend the free upgrades (and I think they probably will), you’ll need to buy a win10 key.
http://www.nirsoft.net/utils/product_cd_key_viewer.html
I used produkey to get the keys from my win 7 boxes for all of my 3 windows 10 “upgrades”. All of which I did from scratch to new SSDs, so I didn’t follow the upgrade path and didn’t let it just find the key itself.
Looks like Microsoft still haven’t given up on putting Win10 messages on Win7/8 computers through updates.
Was looking through my update history and noticed that not only had these
Appeared again.
They added this one on the 13th of July.
More dark patterns fuckery - additional options ‘hidden’ in favour of obvious buttons.
Soma
2728
That “update” was nasty, I thought it was some kind of ransomware.
In a sense it IS ransomware. Comply or we nag you, AGAIN.
My mum asked me to install this on her 5 year old Dell laptop. Sure, let’s give it a shot. Well, other than a slightly confusing installation process (where it seemed to repeatedly bring back the main “Starting download” screen while doing absolutely bugger all) it all appears to have gone swimmingly. So far, Windows 10 looks like Windows 7 but with a flashier menu.
I won’t get back to Australia before the deadline expires, so I guess my main desktop will be on Win 7 for the foreseeable future, but if it ain’t broke etc. My 3 year old laptop, however, never got picked for an upgrade. It’s an original Lenovo laptop with a genuine copy of Windows 7, but it must not be deemed worthy in some manner. I can live with that.
Win10 just lost all my start menu customizations, reverting back to the default “life at a glance”. It’s COMPLETELY UNCLEAR WHY. Nothing in sfc /scannow, no issues in chkdsk, nothing in event logs, recreating indexes didn’t help, nor did rebooting. It just decided to wipe out all my start menu and force me to re-do it. Never had windows wipe out my start menu before, this is truly a new one. Thanks, Win10.
Oh, and it’s hilarious what you have to do to back up start menu customizations. You need to enable administrator logins, login as admin, then copy the heavily protected start menu files to a separate directory. It’s difficult to imagine how this could be less convenient.
They could require you to type in a 25 digit license key?
I believe would actually be faster and less laborious than backing up your start menu config in win10.
I no longer have faith that the free upgrade will be offered post deadline, so I’m thinking of pulling the trigger on my 2 main computers. One is a laptop with 8.1, so there seems to be little reason not to upgrade - I only use it for work other than when traveling. although it’s relatively capable for gaming. The other is my main computer, an older (2010) desktop running Win7 which I’ve upgraded piecemeal over the years - that one I’m a lot less certain about whether it’s worthwhile or more hassle than it’s worth. Can anyone offer some advice?
Take full image backups beforehand.
Clay
2735
I just saw today that France ordered MS to stop tracking Win10 users…
Hopefully that includes allowing users to turn off telemetry without the bullshit we need to go through now. Jerks.
I have a desktop (2008 vintage) which was originally on Vista and subsequently upgraded to Win 7. I haven’t seen any performance issues after upgrading to Win 10. The upgrade worked although the upgrade wasn’t very clear about how far along if was. I only had to manually deal with a print driver for our networked printer after the upgrade.
I upgraded 3 laptops and 2 desktops at my house to Windows 10. Each time I did a fresh install of Windows to a new or wiped SSD (they’re pretty cheap now). I also upgraded the RAM on 2 of the laptops while I was at it. I have had zero issues with any of them. I have one more to go that will probably be the biggest pain, and plan to do it before the upgrade period ends.
Of course, anecdotal success isn’t as helpful as anecdotal failures, but I thought I’d let you know that it’s not all shit and brown rainbows. The nice thing about going to a new drive is your old drive is still ready and functions as a backup. In fact, on one of my machines, it asks when I boot if I want to go back and use the Windows 7 drive to boot into Windows 7 instead of Windows 10.
Also, in all cases I retrieved my Win7 key with produkey, since I can never find my keys when I need them, but they’re hanging out on your machine waiting for you.
My first win10 upgrade completely hosed my computer, thus my suggestion of taking image backups beforehand.
Also unplug random USB stuff from your computer. I kinda-sorta think a bitlocker USB3 drive might be the cause.
Oh Window 10, why won’t you let me position application windows via shortcuts in the top/bottom half of a monitor in portrait mode? Does nobody in the entirety of the Windows team run LP/PL, or PLP, or PPP?
Or, am I missing something?
Don’t get me wrong, I could just install Displayfusion, but I am rather happily avoiding it to date since Win10 does in general handle this stuff reasonably well otherwise.
