I know how popular Windows 10 is with the whimsical fools and clever people of teh forum, but nevertheless, although we are all middle aged*, cycling, vacuum cleaner enthusiasts with little hair left to blow dry, there may still be one or two who still pootle around with PC-building and upgrading and the like, and who still entrust the fruits of their labours to Microsoft.

For those people, who probably have many copies of Windows 7 and 8 hanging about, it may be of some interest that the free 'upgrade' scheme for users of assistive technologies has been extended until January 16. Details are here. There are no checks and it is a completely normal copy of Windows 10.

In other news, for UK peeps, the Currys/PC World sale is quite good at the moment and a couple of laptops with 8th gen i5 cpus are available for £399 and £479. The cheaper HP 15-bs158sa is as ugly as it gets, only has 4GB tbh, but there's a 1TB HDD. Memory and HDD are really easy to get at for upgrade and there's a spare RAM slot. The other is a Lenovo 320S 14IKB. It has a tiddly 125GB SSD, but it comes with 8GB of RAM and a standard SATA bay occupied by a dummy drive (used for an HDD in some models), so again, very easy to upgrade.

I keep meaning to upgrade the dual boot on my main system from 7 to 10 so that is useful.

But I now also remember why I haven't bothered doing it thus far because it'll no doubt trash the bootloader. Sounds like a job for a weekend. Or buy a second hard drive.

Well, I just took advantage of the Lenovo sale mentioned in my post, so I'm installing a new copy of Win 10 on an old hard drive for my old laptop. The old laptop had a nice new SSD so that's going into the Lenovo.

Which bootloader?

Grub of some description. Could do with a fresh install of Linux too since I'm running some old version of Mint.

dd mbr, install/upgrade windows, restore mbr, update grub (so it finds windows)

How do the free upgrades work if you ever want to reinstall Windows 10? Not that I plan to any time soon but might need to one day.

Pretty sure your license is updated to Windows 10 and can be used to validate any future re-installation (not to multiple PCs, obviously).

Excellent question. This is the Microsoft take on it:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/4000735/windows-10-reinstall

Ah yes, I remember reading about downloading the tool to create the installation media now. Thanks. Maybe should make one just in case Windows ever decides to stop working.

Incidentally, according to this article from April, you can install from a downloaded copy of Windows 10 using a 7, 8 or 8.1 key and this will activate fine. You can even ignore the prompt for a key and it will still work, but nag you to activate every so often.

Latest Windows iso available here.

irreversible, right?

Well, if you do a fresh install - yes. You can go back to 7 or 8 from an upgrade install.

I'm guessing an upgrade install should be avoided like any upgrade install would be in the past? Better to go fresh if possible.

Difficult to say. My own desktop PC is an upgrade on top of 8.1 and I can't recall any particular issues with that. I've just installed 7 followed by 10 via the 'assistive technology' route onto my old laptop. I suppose if you have a much-used system which may have all kind of incompatible registry settings and programs set up for the earlier version you may have issues. But then again, most (all?) of the system files are stuffed into a Windows.old folder and replaced. That said, most of my installs have been clean.

I upgraded a work pc from 7 --> 10 with no probs. Also I upgraded my home pc from Fedora 26 -- 27* no probs.


*I reckon this means Fedora is 2.7x better than Windows.

I also upgrade my Windows 10 on my laptop and PC and still I'm using windows 10 without any issue.