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.